Winged Wheel: Desert So Green

Dotted throughout various parts of the North America, Winged Wheel – Whitney Johnson (Matchess), Cory Plump (Spray Paint), Matthew J. Rolin (Powers / Rolin Duo), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Lonnie Slack (Water Damage) and Fred Thomas (Idle Ray, Tyvek) – are like a congregation of lifers bound by the protracted jam session. The mission, finding that moment where everyone hits a frequency akin to a dopamine rush.

The first was the band’s 2022 debut, No Island, and followed by 2024’s Big Hotel – an eclipsing accomplishment of dynamic, diesel fuelled krautrock that reached all the way to the nerve endings – Winged Wheel conjured up the kind of fragmented sounds and sonic shapes so obscure that if punk were a sound, then they were the providers of it.

Winged Wheel’s sonic alchemy continues on Desert So Green. Another shift in style and substance as the collective continue their mission in not making the same record twice. It’s evident from the first note of opening cut, Canvas 11. A series of glittering nightscapes and bass echoes that move to places where they’ve never been, here the band intersects krautrock and art house cinema to the point where it sounds like nothing else out there.

The pivoting continues on Canvas 2 – indie-rock dismantled into some form of futuristic, hypnotic no-wave, and alongside Beautiful Holy Jewel Home, led by Johnson whose vocals sound more something from the fourth world, Winged Wheel are the architects of curling soundscapes that rub against the corners of the mind.

It’s not the only deconstructing they do. Speed Table is garage rock chiselled and fine-tuned with motorik inflections, while closing cut, The Suite Goes Quiet, is Eastern-tinged folk that stealthy moves through the tall grass like wildfire in the night. Worlds away from More Frog Poems, which is a searching space rock jam that has you rifling through the record collection for Loop’s Heaven’s End.

It may sound slapdash on paper, but in practice it’s far more meticulous than that. Even with their answers-first-questions-later approach, everything is presented for a reason, and there’s no better example than Canvas 8. A rustbelt clamour with haunting arpeggios that squeeze from the speakers in black horror, the song quickly swivels as an ethereal wisp of sound emerges that cleanses the mind. It’s Jekyll and Hyde psychedelia where Winged Wheel capture every emotion one experiences throughout the day.

And riding on the crest of a cloud, Bird Spells is where Winged Wheel reach the height of said day. Underpinned by Shelley’s thumping drums, Winged Wheel’s freeing soundscapes present more like the peak of an acid trip. And I See Posuers Every Day is the comedown. All the grease and grit as Rolin’s guitar emits new shades of darkness, here Winged Wheel rattle along the fault lines, navigating the perilous passages as only they know how.

Moving their art forward with little consequence for anything around them, Desert So Green is another singular document within a catalogue that plays out like a series of incongruous short stories as opposed to any overarching allegory. It’s this cut and paste methodology that sets Winged Wheel apart from their adversaries, and the world of experimental guitar-based music would be far more insipid without their presence in it.  

Desert So Green is out Friday via 12XU. Purchase from Bandcamp.