* PREORDER * WINGED WHEEL - Desert So Green LP

* PREORDER * expected to arrive mid-late Jan

“So, how did this band even happen?” That’s the question most often asked of Winged Wheel, a creatively and geographically scattered collective who have somehow congregated to make a noise that’s unexpected but undeniable. The band includes Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Circuit des Yeux), Cory Plump (Spray Paint), Matthew Rolin (guitar wizard, Powers/Rolin Duo), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Lonnie Slack and Fred Thomas (Tyvek), each player living in a different city and bringing their own unique element to the group’s surgically-assembled murk of high energy kosmische rock with jammed-out tendencies.

They abandoned the play-now-sort-it-out-later approach of Big Hotel and instead spent hours refining flashes of inspiration into coherent songs. Full-blast, krautrock-informed jamming took a backseat to deeper experimentation, and the band found new dimensions, different atmospheres. The arrangements are still dense with layers of synths, noisy disruptions, and glowing orbs of alien sound, but every shift is considered and intentional.

Defined by a newfound restraint, there’s also an intensity that never lets up. “Bird Spells” pulsates perpetually at the edge of a breaking point. Can-esque rhythms, scrapes of viola, and Throbbing Gristle-level decay all get dubbed into infinity on the demonic “Canvas 2.” At times, some ripping weirdness cuts through the simmering. Syncopated guitars lock in on “Speed Table” while Shelley destroys the kit as only he can, and Slack’s greasy steel guitar riffing of “I See Poseurs Every Day” evokes scenes of a truck stop showdown between ZZ Top and the Silver Apples. “Beautiful Holy Jewel Home” is the closest Winged Wheel has ever come to straightforward melodic tuneage, and it still arrives in a form that’s uneasy and fragmented.
DSG changes gears, defies probability, confounds in strains of joy and confusion, and leaves us wondering and still without answers, how did this band even happen?