How is it that two things that are fundamentally the same can be completely different? Two bands, each harking back to a specific historical reference point in heavy music, each using distortion and volume as an important part of their presentation. Standing just outside the big old turntable shed’s main room you could just hear them and easily imagine Wednesday and Airbourne following each other on some festival stage and sharing the same audience.
Not so much inside the room, though. Wednesday, however they might care to describe themselves, are currently a grunge band, but with a singer-songwriter, Karly Hartzman, who dwells more in introspection and observation than rage and self-flagellation. So the big crunchy riffs come with interestingly sketched scenarios: ‘Catchin’ up with the townies/ Some have gone but most are still around/ The ghosts of them surround me/ They hang on tight until they drown,’ she sang on ‘Townies’; what a great set-up.
Airbourne are, and have always been, AC/DC at x 1.5 speed. At the Roundhouse, their singer-guitarist Joel O’Keeffe, who was shirtless throughout, played one solo round being carried around the venue on a roadie’s shoulders, like Angus Young back in the day. Like AC/DC, their lyrical range is efficiently concise: more or less, both rocking and rolling are good things and are to be protected. And sex and booze are good.
And, lo, Wednesday’s audience by and large stood very respectfully, with a bit of gentle moshing when encouraged by Hartzman, and some heartfelt singing along to some particularly resonant similes. They booed ICE and when they tried to form a circle pit, it ended with the participants getting the timing wrong and just standing there. Airbourne’s crowd threw pints at each other, took off their T-shirts and threw them at each other too and cheered all mentions of both rock and roll. They had a circle pit going to the rock classics being played through the PA long before Airbourne came on, and it never let up.
Wednesday have reached this level with their sixth album; with their sixth approaching, Airbourne have been here for a while. Wednesday’s trajectory may continue upwards, Airbourne will likely stick around here. That’s because Wednesday are flexible and imaginative; Airbourne are tremendous fun, but flexible and imaginative are not adjectives one would apply.
Rock has a long tradition of Stonesiness. Every band tries to sound a bit like the Stones at times, because it still signifies some great link to rock past. AC/DC took one particular element of the Stones – the up-tempo, riff-driven rockers such as ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Start Me Up’ – and extrapolated it to its logical conclusion as something diamond hard and precise, elements interlocking as precisely as a fine watch. They created a sound so instantly identifiable that you can’t sound AC/DCish as you can Stonesy. If you are audibly influenced by AC/DC, you just sound exactly like AC/DC.
That’s not a bad thing: as any fule kno, AC/DC are one of the greatest bands ever. But even their run of truly unimpeachable albums is only three, from Powerage in 1978 to Back in Black in 1980, with a good number of great songs before then and a few after. If even AC/DC can drain their aquifer for only so long, how can Airbourne sustain themselves?
Presumably by continuing to write songs that stand up as well as anything from the less remarkable AC/DC albums and being able to play them a lot more frequently than AC/DC do. There are a lot worse ways to spend a Saturday night than seeing a band who sound like a band you really love, without having to be concerned that one of them might pass away during the show.
Even within their current genre, though, Wednesday are adapting. The spidery, ragged lead guitar lines that all those crunchy groups used to have? Wednesday have them, too, but played on wildly distorted pedal or lap steel guitar by Xandy Chelmis. It doesn’t add anything visually, of course, because he’s sitting down. And then, of course, because it sounds exactly like an electric guitar, what is the actual point of it? But never mind, it’s clever. And it keeps a pre-existing steel guitarist employed when otherwise there would be scant opportunities to play.
Hartzman’s melodies are pointed and sticky as well, and on ‘Elderberry Wine’ she proved she can write an equally adept country song, on which the steel guitar returned to its more normal sound. She’s truly talented, and the band are great players, if a little too lacking in charisma to come across as a real band rather than her backup players. She’s the one who people think of as an artist. But still, like Joel O’Keeffe, she’s just someone playing rock music very loud.
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