Concert Review | The charm of a loose set: Wednesday Live in San Diego

The charm of a loose set: Wednesday Live in San Diego

Karly Hartzman laughs off the slip-ups, false starts and onstage missteps. It’s a “loose set” she says, shrugging it off with a giggle. The crowd doesn’t seem to mind too much either. It was the fourth show of a 19-date fall tour for Hartzman’s solo project-turned full band, Wednesday. Playing to a sold out room at San Diego’s Belly Up, they were quite a distance from their home in Asheville, North Carolina. But a night of a few missed notes, lyrics or cues isn’t likely to derail a band that’s already faced its fair share of hurdles on the way to indie rock notoriety, and even less likely to diminish the love from their devout fans. Watching them rip through their set, while pausing for the shy talks amongst themselves and to the crowd between songs, it’s hard to not love this band. At their root, they’re a pure-hearted group of friends with a shared love for the music. Perhaps, on the day they first got together to play some songs, they never intended to play to crowds this far from home. But we’re fortunate they did.

The five members of Wednesday step onto the stage, which is adorned with a tapestry of the “Bleeds” cover art and a variety of dolls – some that look like sweet childhood keepsakes and others that look horribly cursed and dragged from the depths of a basement.

They start with the lead track of the latest album, “Reality TV Argument Bleeds” – the perfect opening song for their set. It winds up in anticipation, squealing guitars building, accentuated by the crashing drums, before ripping open to a beautifully melodic pedal steel riff. Divine in recording, even better live. The setlist featured every track off “Bleeds” (with the exception of the album’s eleventh track), while still showing some love to their last acclaimed album, “Rat Saw God.”

As they play through the evening, the noisy tracks give way to the lighter twang sounds to the soft ballads, allowing themselves the space to touch on a range of emotions and stories, of which they seem to have no shortage. In her lyricism, Hartzman turns to the experiences and surrounding scenes of her home in the south – the titular character’s tale of getting dentures at 33 on “Gary’s II,” making up for lost years with an old friend while killing time (“Phish Pepsi”) and on “Fate Is, ”the roadside billboard that makes her consider the likelihood of an afterlife in hell.

Her style is certainly her own, distinctly shaping up over their last few releases. Drawing from personal anecdotes, hometown news headlines, passing observations and real characters, she is a storyteller well-deserving of the attention of a crowded room. Her stories don’t often shy toward ambiguity, but they hold out a vulnerable, personal truth, mixed with bitterness and a prevailing charm.

“Feel like I’m almost good enough to know you/ I oversold myself on the night we met,” she sings on “The Way Love Goes,” capturing the early stages of a heartbreak. She had admittedly fought through tears when recording that track, one of the softest and most honest ones on the album, and now sings it to a few hundred people.

Regardless of the lyrics’ origin from Wednesday’s own story, there’s a quality that offers familiarity to a listener that exists far from their world in North Carolina. Hartzman’s attention to her lyricism is certainly not lost upon the audience, who sang along on the fondly yearning “Elderberry Wine,” a new highlight in the band’s setlist. In the last line of the song’s final verse, she sings of a freeing realization, sure to resonate with those who’ve found a similar peace:

“I find comfort that angels don’t give a damn.”

“Bull Believer” and “Wasp” are the last two songs of their set, both purely cathartic, and some of their best performances. As physically taxing as the two songs seem to be, I’m amazed they’re still a staple of Wednesday’s set since I last saw them a year and a half earlier. As proven by her lyrics, Hartzman carries a lifetime’s worth of stories with her, and not all of them are pleasant. So as she rips into the screaming breakdown of “Bull Believer,” she’s already made its purpose clear – to release the residual pain and anger of past and present horrors, and she invites the crowd to do the same.