Wednesday and Awning made for a well-matched bill at Hollywood Avondale in Tāmaki Makaurau: two guitar bands drawn to dynamic shifts and emotional release, but at different points in their development.
Awning, the local openers, brought ambition, range and the sense of a band still growing into its ideas. Wednesday, touring behind Bleeds, showed what can happen when country, Americana, shoegaze, grunge, emo and noise are absorbed into a sound that belongs fully to them.
Awning
With six players on stage, Awning were clearly reaching for something bigger than straightforward indie rock. Their songs varied in shape and attack, moving from loose guitar drive to more forceful passages, with enough shifts in texture and pace to show a band with ideas and ability. Long pauses for tuning between songs, and a slightly self-conscious reference to the size of the venue, gave the set the feel of a band adjusting to a larger room and working out how to carry its ambition across the stage.
The crowd seemed to understand that, meeting the set with quiet patience rather than restlessness. Awning’s strongest moments suggest they could become more commanding, more cohesive, and better able to match the scale of their sound to the scale of their ideas.
Wednesday
Wednesday’s set leaned heavily on Bleeds, with Reality TV Argument Bleeds, Pick Up That Knife, Elderberry Wine, Bitter Everyday, Townies and Wasp giving the night its core. Rat Saw God was represented more selectively, including Got Shocked and the closing cartharsis of Bull Believer, while the band also reached back to Twin Plagues, played a Martha Wainwright cover and debuted a new song, June 2.
That song carried a small piece of local history. On Wednesday’s previous visit to Tāmaki Makaurau, an audience member took the band snorkelling after Karly Hartzman asked from the stage whether anyone could. The phrase “June 2” came out of a misunderstanding of accents and became the title of a new song, given its first airing here at the Hollywood. It was one of several moments that made the show feel connected to the city, rather than simply passing through it.
Hartzman was in a loose, funny and very talkative mood. She joked about Sunday still being the weekend, apologised for sneezing on someone near the sound booth, and reminisced about a previous show at The Whammy Bar. She also gave plenty of space to the band around her, especially Xandy Chelmis on steel guitar, whose dry interjections made him an effective foil. Their banter gave the night a relaxed, familiar warmth, as did the moment when a member of Awning was called back to the stage to help out on shaker. The band appeared casual and at ease; the songs did not.
The country and Americana influences came through in Chelmis’s steel guitar and Hartzman’s storytelling, but live Wednesday were much heavier than those labels suggest. At full stretch, they were a rock band: hard, distorted, physical, and close at times to grunge, emo and noise. Hartzman’s screams gave the songs another register, carrying them into something bodily and confrontational.
Wednesday moved beyond any simple list of influences by making country detail survive inside a heavier, more dynamic rock vocabulary. A phrase, an image, a memory or a joke might sit at the centre of a song, but the band pushed it outward through shifts in volume and texture. Alan Miller and Ethan Baechtold held the ground on drums and bass, Jake “Spyder” Pugh drove the guitar lines over Hartzman’s rhythm guitar, and Chelmis’s steel guitar cut through the distortion with a sound that pulled the songs back towards another tradition.
The Martha Wainwright song provided a quieter space in the set. Hartzman introduced it as a story about family, absent fathers and songwriters answering one another through music. Wednesday’s own songs are full of damage, humour, bodies, places and half-buried memory, and the cover sat well alongside them.
For the final stretch, Hartzman announced that the last run of songs would be “all bangers” and invited those who wanted to mosh to come forward. The warning was fair, and soon the floor was a tide of pogoing bodies, the pit surging towards the stage and back as the band pushed harder.
Before Bull Believer, Hartzman spoke about North Carolina, the United States, the American flag, ICE, deportations, racism, genocide and trans rights, linking the problems of her home to the problems of throughout the world. When she invited the audience to join her end of song scream, the gesture felt explicitly communal and political
Wednesday came with a set built largely from Bleeds, but the songs found new meanings in the room. The night moved from Awning’s quietly attentive crowd to Wednesday’s final surge of bodies and distorted release. By the end, the band had made space for humour, damage, politics, local memory and the force of a room screaming back. That is a lot for one set to hold, but Wednesday made it count.
John Bradbury
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