This Event is General Admission – Standing Room Only > MJ Lenderman: MJ Lenderman writes songs that are amorphous and elastic, rising to fill the venue they’re in, generous to accommodate the number of players on stage (an often unpredictable affair), less concerned with replicating the studio version than they are with meeting the crowd where they’re at. On his records, the Asheville-based Lenderman handles most of the playing, but with The Wind, it’s a multi-headed beast.

Karly Hartzman: A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din.