Wednesday

• Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling 'Em Up [Orindal, 2022] ★★
• Rat Saw God [Dead Oceans, 2023] A
• Bleeds [Dead Oceans, 2025] A−

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling 'Em Up [Orindal, 2022]
Covers album proves it's hard to do justice to Roger Miller or Chris Bell and how lucky we are that scattered musos still remember Vic Chesnutt and Gary Stewart (and for that matter Chris Bell) ("Rabbit Box," "She's Actin' Single [I'm Drinkin' Doubles]") ★★

Rat Saw God [Dead Oceans, 2023]
Clotted, murky, ruefully sarcastic, yet also resigned, grateful, and at moments even funny in a "There's a sex shop off the highway with a biblical name" kind of way, these 10 just barely rockin' songs in 37 minutes add up to the story of a pair of lovers neither of whom deserves the other while remaining a decent bet to stick it through even so, because they're smart enough to understand how much worse it could be, as in the drugged decrepitude their neighbors put up with. Where Ashley McBryde's Lindeville peeked beneath the made-up surface of a two-faced Alabama town and played its hypocrisies for fond laughs, Jarly Hartzman and her gang know the outskirts of country-hipster Asheville too well to think its habitual hypocrisy anything but some cross between pathetic and tragic. So they figurel the best way to escape its pitfalls is look them in the eye and dare them to do their worst. A

Bleeds [Dead Oceans, 2025]
Karly Hartzman specializes in bleak tales from the scrubby subsistence bohemia of greater Asheville, North Carolina. Stoking bonfires with leaf blowers seems like fun, and why shouldn't your champagne taste like elderberry wine? But weeds ruin the local trampoline, one guy needs a new set of choppers after a local thug mistakes him for the S.O.B. who fucked his wife, and eating grocery-store sushi while you chop up your ketamine with your room key isn't most people's idea of a good time. In the mountains this music may well have its own life. Pastoral as that term is generally understood it isn't. A−