Wednesday - Twin Plagues

Wednesday - Twin Plagues

In a long and emotionally exhausting year of being inside (alone, in
my case,) I have found myself thinking about mirrors. How to avoid
spending too much time in them, most days. Taking inventory of the
real, physical self is difficult work, work that I’m not entirely opposed
to but work that became immediately more treacherous for me when I
had to witness the very real toll that time, modern anxieties, isolation,
and boredom were taking on me. It was easier, it seemed, to spiral
into a not-so-distant glorious past, to use memory as a tool of both
excitement and healing. But, speaking of excitement, I like to stumble
towards a band with no agenda, no purpose, uncovering sound almost
on accident. This is how I first heard Wednesday. The band came to me
and I don’t remember how, or why. They simply arrived, as if we’d been
traveling toward each other our whole lives. I Was Trying To Describe
You To Someone soaked into my summer of 2020, and in sound, in
spirit, in central concerns and the execution of them, it
took me back to an era before the current era, which I’d needed at
the time. The past can feel less hellish than the present if we are,
sometimes, not fully honest with ourselves.
There is the trick of nostalgia that I spend a lot of time playing with in
my own writing, and somewhat tormented by in my own living. The very
real idea that nostalgia is both a useful tool and also a weapon if it isn’t
paired with something that approaches a type of rigorous honesty.
But if I may go back to all of these ideas of nostalgia and our old,
tricky, past selves that are, indeed, a part of the house of bricks that
make up our present self, what I also hope you, listener, might adore
about this album is the exact moment at the start of “The Burned
Down Dairy Queen” when Karly sings I was hiding in a room in my mind
/ and I made me take a look at myself. Because if you, like me, have
been avoiding mirrors – both metaphorical and real – this is where
the album becomes a lighthouse, echoing bright across the darkness
of my otherwise dark and empty chambers. So much of these songs
meditate on the past in far less romantic ways than I have found myself
meditating on the past, and I was desperate for the recalibration that
this album provided.
So, yes, the songs are good. You will maybe roll down your windows
on a comfortable day on the right stretch of road in a warm season and turn the volume up when “Birthday Song” gets good and loud and sing-
along-able. You might sit atop a rooftop at night, closer to the moon than you were on the ground, and let “Ghost Of A Dog” churn and rattle
you to some nighttime realization that you couldn’t have had in silence.
But, even on top of all of this, on top of all the pleasures and the
mercies that the sounds on this album might afford. I hope and think,
too, that it will remind anyone who listens that we are a collection of
many reflections. All of them deserving patience.
—Hanif Abdurraqib

SIDE A: 
1) Twin Plagues
2) Handsome Man
3) The Burned Down Dairy Queen
4) Cliff
5) How Can You Live if You Can’t
Love How Can You if You Do
6) Cody’s Only

SIDE B:
7) Toothache
8) Birthday Song
9) One More Last One
10) Three Sisters
11) Gary’s
12) Ghost of A Dog

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