The Wheel Workers - 'One More Thing To Say'

Most albums take a few months or years to reach completion, but 'One More Thing To Say' needed two decades. That extraordinary gapa around The Wheel Workers' eighth studio album is woven into its character. These songs began when the original Texas lineup were young musicians sharing living space, jobs and endless rehearsal time. Years later, Steven Higginbotham returned to the recordings with considerably more experience, reconnecting with former members and bringing newer collaborators into the process.

What emerges is neither an archaeological exercise nor an attempt to disguise old material as new. Instead, 'One More Thing To Say' feels like two different periods of the band occupying the same room.

Across its sixteen tracks, they move throughout with remarkable freedom. Their psychedelia has dirt beneath its fingernails: basslines circle insistently, delayed guitars shimmer and then fracture, while power chords arrive with enough force to keep the record from floating away entirely.

'O'er The Sands' is especially effective, beginning with intricately moving percussion and gleaming guitar before the arrangement becomes increasingly abrasive. Written against the backdrop of war, its anxiety has outlived the circumstances that first inspired it.

Elsewhere, 'Distractions' and 'Seaside' lean towards impressionistic writing, giving the album more space and atmosphere between its heavier passages. Then 'In The Breeze' provides an appropriately communal finish, exploring the chemistry of musicians responding to one another in realm time.

The Wheel Workers aren't attempting to recreate their twenties from memory. They are allowing those younger musicians to coexist with the people they became.

As a result, 'One More Thing To Say' becomes something far more compelling than a delayed release. It's a record about unfinished ideas, ageing, reconciliation and the strange possibility that a piece of art can wait patiently until its creators are finally ready to understand what it needs.