Have you noticed it’s almost impossible for a band to complete an album before the deadline? Well The Wheel Workers decided to do things a little differently: start recording, break up, then leave the music alone for twenty years and then rejoin together to finish the album with a bang rather than a whimper.
Honestly, fair enough. We’ve all got unfinished projects lying around. Usually, though, they’re half-read books or exercise equipment collecting dust, not sixteen tracks of psychedelic rock waiting for another shot at life.
One More Thing To Say originally started in the early 2000s, but the band fell apart and, with it, the project in 2005. Twenty years after the fact, Steven Higginbotham revisited the recordings and gathered the band members both past and present to complete the album. It’s an album that sounds more like a conversation that was interrupted and now is back where it was before.
Sonically, The Wheel Workers echo the kind of alt rock that can’t stick to one groove. A little Sonic Youth ratty-ness. A little Pixies quirkiness that becomes a catchy tune. A little Jane’s Addiction excess, combined with some early Floyd spaciness. That’s a lot of family history, but the band makes it look easy by keeping everything pretty chill. The tunes can be loud, moody, fidgety and sweet without feeling like they’re trying to show you something by being zany.
“Spreading the Fire” gets things moving, while “So Wrong” and “Half-Asleep” show off the band’s taste for slightly crooked melodies and shifting moods. There’s a scruffiness here that works in the album’s favor. The songs don’t feel polished within an inch of their lives and thank goodness for that. Psychedelic rock is already prone to disappearing up its own fog machine. A little roughness helps keep things grounded.
The album’s strongest moments come when the music has something to say beyond “listen to this weird noise we made.” “O’er The Sands,” for example, carries political concerns shaped by the Iraq War era. It’s a reminder that songs written twenty years ago can land differently when you hear them today. Unfortunately, the world hasn’t exactly run out of reasons to write angry political songs. If anything, it keeps supplying fresh material.
“One Must Speak” is another highlight, partly because of its history. Originally an acoustic song by Chris Maness, it’s been reworked into a full-band arrangement. The change gives it a different kind of weight and it fits the album’s larger story: these aren’t just old recordings being dusted off and shoved onto streaming services. They’ve been revisited, reshaped and finished by people who have lived a whole lot of life since they first played them.
Elsewhere, “Distractions” and “Seaside” offer different shades of the band’s sound, keeping the record from becoming one long, uninterrupted psychedelic haze. “In The Breeze” is a particularly satisfying way to wrap things up, starting with a waltz-like feel before building into a bigger, soaring finish. It takes its time getting there, but that’s the point. Not every song needs to sprint toward its climax like it’s late for an appointment.
Higginbotham produced the album, bringing together contributions from musicians connected to the band across different periods, while Steve Christensen handled the mixing. Given the unusual recording history, One More Thing To Say could easily have ended up sounding like a box of unrelated leftovers. Instead, it has a reasonably clear identity, even when the songs head off in different directions. You can hear the years in the project without feeling like you need a timeline and a clipboard to enjoy it.
Sixteen tracks is still a lot to take in and the album occasionally feels longer than it needs to be. Not every song hits with the same force and some of the more exploratory passages could use a tighter edit. But there’s something appealing about a record that refuses to pretend it arrived fully formed. Its sprawling nature is part of the deal. This is a collection that survived a breakup, a couple of decades and whatever mysterious forces caused musicians to abandon perfectly good recording projects in the first place.
And that’s what makes One More Thing To Say more interesting than a simple archival release. It’s about unfinished business, but not in the dramatic, tortured-artist sense. It’s about people returning to something they made together, figuring out what still works and finally getting it across the finish line.
Twenty years is a long time to wait for an album. It’s also a long time for the world to change around the songs, giving some of them new meanings and leaving others as snapshots of the moment they came from. The Wheel Workers don’t need to pretend otherwise. They’ve simply finished the job.
One More Thing To Say isn’t perfect and it doesn’t need to be. It’s an occasionally sprawling, often engaging slice of psychedelic alternative rock with a genuinely unusual story behind it. Most importantly, it feels like a band reconnecting with its own unfinished ideas and finding that there’s still life in them.
Turns out some things are worth coming back to. Even if it takes twenty years and a very patient hard drive.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
