Consumer Guide Album

Wednesday: 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