(We start a new week at our site with DGR‘s enthusiastic review of the new album by the Anglo-Finnish prog metal band Wheel, released late last week by InsideOut Music.)
Normally we try to keep the veil up when we cover a group, to keep the author’s personality out of the writing but in this case I feel that I have to place my neck on the chopping block in order to justify this one. If you’ll indulge more of my wanderings out of the metal world for a bit, let’s take a journey with the band Wheel.
Our history with this progressive rock/metal group is a long one. The Finnish/English combination have been hanging around the rafters of the NoCleanSinging halls for a bit now, largely due to my own fandom for their album Moving Backwards. Since then, I’ve tried to get a post or two up about them whenever they have something new to offer and in that time we’ve covered their album Resident Human – one of two albums to reference Heinlein’s writings that year – and their recent-ish EP Rumination, which was released upon them signing to major progressive rock label InsideOut.
The group’s combination of heavier metallic sounds, progressive rock, and yes, even some heftier guitar bending of the djent variety at times, is one that has allowed the band to create both short songs verging on radio rock with plenty of hooks and longer progressive numbers that have many times pulled back the curtain on shared similarities with the band Tool. Even with this in place there has always been room for Wheel to surprise, and that is still the case when it comes to the group’s newest album Charismatic Leaders.
That said, we are numbers dorks here at NoCleanSinging and we do like us a pattern, so imagine our joy when our first dance with Charismatic Leaders revealed it to be another seven-song effort. Wheel are now three albums in, but if there is one thing they’re going to be consistent about it is that their full-lengths, come hell or high water so far, are going to be seven-song efforts.
Moving Backwards had an even spread of longer and shorter tracks, with one instrumental to help break things up, and Resident Human followed in trodding through similar musical trails. It probably doesn’t shock then that Charismatic Leaders follows that path as well, although this is about the only time wherein Wheel have a rigid musical blueprint that they follow. The more interesting part with them and each of their albums is just how fine a dance they can perform across their multiple genre-lines without falling into influence-worship pitfalls, and the following question from the other side of the room, just how many opportunities are they going to provide for drummer Santeri Saksala to beat the unliving hell out of the kit before him?
Bearing that in mind, you’re not going to be in the most rigidly metal territory that you might be used to now. James Lascelles is an incredible singer, and for three albums and three EPs Wheel have gotten a lot of mileage out of the gentleman’s ability to craft a hook. Charismatic Leaders charts a fun path for him as well then, because on top of the expected strong vocal lines and rhythm guitar work, he’s allowed to put some grit on a few of his sung lines.
Imagine the raised eyebrow the first time the heavier vocal section hits in the closing thirty seconds of the otherwise straightforward rocker of a song that is “Empire”. “Empire” is the sort of song we’re referring to when we say Wheel have always had a few shorter numbers in their pocket for each album. They’re where the band stop with the sonic exploration and trend more into musical excavation. It’s their chance to get heavy, and yes, to bring in some sort of anthemic hook. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I regularly have the main vocal line from “Up The Chain” from 2018’s Moving Backwards stuck in my head consistently.
The fun stat with Charismatic Leaders though? “Empire” is only one of two songs like it in the the album’s track list – the other being the also early released single “Disciple”. The last short song is a minute-long instrumental that doubly serves as a moment of peace and a scene-setter known as “Caught In The Afterglow”, which segues into Charismatic Leader‘s moody final song.
What makes Wheel exciting isn’t just the fact that when they get down to brass tacks they can be a solid rock band but also the fact that they can make a longer song feel like no time has passed at all. Wheel must’ve discovered the same sort of black magick that groups like Herod, Opeth, and The Ocean have harvested, somehow managing to create music as expansive as they want but without letting a listener’s attention wander. There’s four of them on Charismatic Leaders and two of those are well within the ten minute range.
“Porcelain” takes on dreamlike qualities as the song drifts through its center piece, splitting the difference between the hard-rocking knuckle-crushers on the Charismatic Leaders table and the truly expansive songs like “Submission” and “The Freeze”. “The Freeze” serves as Charismatic Leader‘s climactic song and is perfectly built that way. It is intricate and soft in all the parts it needs to be and reaches crescendo a couple of times. It’s not often you would cite an album’s last song as one of its greatest but “The Freeze” is the type of song you could imagine Wheel building their way to throughout Charismatic Leader‘s run time.
“Porcelain”, on the other side of the coin, calls to mind the drifting numbers that wandered their way through Resident Human but also is probably one of the clearer evolutions of a song from the Rumination EP, expanding upon a few of the ideas the group were playing with in that EP’s third song “Impervious”.
“Submission” is a loftier song by comparison to its immediate siblings. Yes, it’s one of the previously mentioned longer numbers as well, which allows plenty of room for Wheel to breathe, and it isn’t too often that you can sense the band doing just that throughout a song. For a large chunk of it though, the band are awash and replete with guitar effects, setting up an aural landscape that for most of the song’s run time has the guitar work flying somewhere just above cloud-level.
“Submission” is a big wanderer of a song but continually cycles back around to a solid rhythm riff and drum part that is heavy on the tom work, keeping it chained to the ground enough that it never fully manages to send itself into orbit, leaving listeners in the wake. “Submission” sometimes plays out more like a guitar demo for Jussi Turunen to really let loose at times but when you have a closing few minutes like the winding segment of “Submission” at the end, you almost want to let Wheel run free more often.
Charismatic Leaders finds a lot of life in applying a mirror to Wheel‘s past activities and expanding upon many of their ideas. It is both appreciated and exciting to hear the bass guitar rumbling back to life again within Charismatic Leader‘s bounds, something that was sorely missing within the space-faring ideas of much of Resident Human. Wheel got relentlessly heavy to show that the rhythm section was still powerful as ever on their Ruminations EP following that, and now with Charismatic Leaders, Wheel have somehow found the way to split the difference and deftly dance among all of their releases. They’ve been combined in a truly intricate musical work that honestly feels like a true-followup to Moving Backwards.
Wheel are a band that have been steadily moving upwards for some time now and are making some serious headway on the path to success – even if that path has often found the band on the other side of the country from where I am whenever they’re touring… enjoy that May 23rd date in Roseville guys, I’ll wave from the East Coast for the second time this’ll have happened – and albums like Charismatic Leaders are the type that will get them there. Wheel are impressive in how they make minor alterations to their musical recipe yet somehow manage to have whole albums spring to life from it, and not only that, manage to hold your interest the whole time. Charismatic Leaders is an enjoyable work on that front and one that is worthy of recommending, even in our murky neck of the internet woods.
https://wheelband.lnk.to/CharismaticLeaders
https://insideoutmusic.bandcamp.com/album/charismatic-leaders-24-bit-hd-audio
https://www.facebook.com/wheelband/