It's New to Me: What We Had by Wednesday Week (1987)

Illustration of the foyer of the Hotel restaurant for Dungelman & Versteeg, 1944

There haven't been many new releases this month that have interested me, so I'm going to stick with writing about older stuff I've picked up recently. Today's "It's New to Me" is Wednesday Week, an LA pop group that released a couple records in the late '80s. Their best-known release, What We Had, was reissued a couple years ago, paired with their 1984 EP Betsy's House and some other bonus tracks. The core of Wednesday Week was Kristi Callan and her sister Kelly - the two of them wrote most of the band's material, the former singing and playing guitar with the latter on drums. A series of bassists and lead guitarists came through the band's lineup, the two most significant contributors being Heidi Rodewald and David Nolte, who both played on What We Had.

Wednesday Week often gets lumped in with LA's "paisley underground", but their approach was less psychedelic and more clean power pop with some garage-rock influences, like that scene's Plimsouls and Bangles. What We Had sounds pretty good - produced by Don Dixon, the emphasis is on Kristi Callan's voice and melodies. Bassist Heidi Rodewald contributed a couple of harder-edged tunes to the album, including the opener "Why" and "Missionary", and they provide a nice balance to Callan's folkier tunes like "I Wonder What You Hear" and "If Only". One of my favorites on the album is "Circle", which pairs a Dwight Twilley power-pop hook with one of Callan's feistier vocals.

What We Had is a solid set of songs, but some of them breeze by without making much of an impression. I couldn't pin down what was missing at first, but, listening to the Betsy's House EP, it became clear that Wednesday Week had a tendency toward monochromatic melody lines. Their earlier songs have verse melodies that hover around a single note without much progression, and some of this comes through on What We Had as well, particularly songs with "heavier" lyrics like "Suicide". Interestingly, one of my favorite songs on this release is the last bonus track "No Going Back", which was the title track to the band's final album, a self-released cassette from 1990. That album probably won't get a reissue any time soon, but there's plenty to enjoy on this expanded version of What We Had.

"Circle" by Wednesday Week