The Wheel Workers – Queen City Sounds and Art

The Wheel Workers Call for Embracing New Ways of Thinking and Living on “Day After Day”

The Wheel Workers, photo courtesy the artists

The Wheel Workers has proven itself as a band that excels at creating a sense of forward momentum and introspective mood in the material for it’s new album Harbor which released on 8/26/2022. A fine example of the song “Day After Day” that establishes a strong low end push in the beginning with vocals that follow a wide ranging arc of tone that syncs well with the synths and when all the elements come together mid-song and transition into a more contemplative passage it’s obvious that we’re not hearing a band that got some memo about how post-punk is supposed to sound. It’s more akin to something we might have heard out of New Model Army or The Sound or some 1980s art pop/rock band willing to get creative with arrangements and song structure so that a song’s ability to keep and hold your attention continues to the end. The fact that the song seems to be about being fed up with needing to try to recreate institutions and ways of living that have failed us rather than establishing something that works better for everyone and to nurture a vision for a more viable and nurturing future society and not wait around for someone to do that for us or wait for some authoritarian order to impose a new frame upon us despite what we might all like to see is just a bonus. The line “I train my heart to let go day after day” speaks eloquently to a willingness to realize that the way things were held up so high is turning out to be a collective romanticizing of a dysfunctional society and its norms because things now seem so decayed and on the verge of collapse when we can imagine and make better. Listen to “Day After Day” on YouTube and follow The Wheel Workers at the links provided.

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The Wheel Workers Rally to Burn Past the Creative Doldrums on “Suck It Up”

“Suck It Up” might initially get The Wheel Workers compared to the Pixies or some older alternative rock band and not just because the group has been around since the turn of the century. The loud-quiet-loud dynamic is there but the Pixies didn’t invent that. That was another Boston band called Mission of Burma. But obvious comparison aside, this song has a wonderfully demented structure so that its buzzsaw guitar riff hovers above and then below the vocal line and the frantic keyboards, which get to shine in spectacular fashion mid-song going off the rails and circling back on track, while the drums and bass seem to guide the arc of the song and anchor it as it seems to threaten to fall apart at any moment. The vocals, both the leads and backing, are anthemic in their enthusiasm in expressing a fairly complicated emotion seemingly jaded but ready to pick oneself up to try the things you love again even if you have to coax yourself into even making the effort. Lines like “Stab deep until can’t bleed anymore” and “All the dreams, unstuck, unstored” really capture that moment in life when you really do need to put effort into endeavors you take for granted and have been through countless times. When it’s a creative project you need to summon a bit more of actual juice from your psyche rather than depend purely on going through the motions ritual or it feels like and comes across like phony bullshit and this song is very much in form and spirit the opposite of approaching the music from a place of psychic numbness. Maybe you need to give yourself a little tough love and knock the dust off as the title suggests to get going but it seems obviously worth it. Listen to “Suck It Up” on YouTube and connect with The Wheel Workers at the links below.