Not everything abandoned is a failure. Sometimes life simply moves faster than art. That thought hangs over One More Thing To Say, the remarkable eighth album from The Wheel Workers, whose origins stretch back to an earlier version of the Texas collective more than twenty years ago.
There’s an inherent melancholy to the idea. Young musicians make songs together, the band fractures, adulthood accelerates, and the unfinished recordings survive quietly in an archive. But this is not really a sad record. If anything, its existence feels quite triumphant.
Steven Higginbotham eventually returned to those sessions and discovered that the material still meant something. Old relationships were revisited. Former bandmates contributed again. Musicians from later incarnations of The Wheel Workers joined the process. And what might have remained a private document gradually became a fully realised sixteen-song album.
There’s plenty of 90s alt-rock grit, but The Wheel Workers rarely stay in one place for long. Their guitars can chime before collapsing into distortion; basslines can become almost trance-like; while synthesisers introduce a spectral quality around the edges.
‘One Must Speak’ finds propulsion through repetition, demonstrating the way the full ensemble can enlarge a relatively simple idea. While tracks like ‘Distractions’ and ‘Seaside’ are less direct, preferring suggestion and imagery, whereas ‘In The Breeze’ ends the record with something approaching pure musical companionship.
The story surrounding One More Thing To Say is fundamentally about people returning to something they once shared. Whatever difficulties existed between them, the music remained as evidence of connection.
It gives the album an emotional character few deliberately planned records could reproduce. Every restored part carries an awareness of passing time, while every new addition acknowledges that the musicians themselves have changed.
One More Thing To Say is therefore an argument for leaving the door open. Some unfinished things are not waiting to be forgotten. They are waiting for us to become capable of finishing them.