The Wheel Workers, post-truth

It hasn’t even been a full decade since the first time I heard The Wheel Workers — which was then less a “band” and more just frontman/songwriter Steven Higginbotham yelling (okay, okay, speaking eloquently) into the void — but in the intervening years, it feels like we’ve seen change enough to last a century; that goes for both the band and the world as a whole.

Back then, Obama was in the White House, we were crawling out of the Great Recession, and while things may not have been completely great, they at least looked relatively hopeful. Fast-forward to now, and unless you happen to wear a MAGA hat un-ironically, well, things look fairly screwed up. We’ve got a Presidential administration that’s damn near sociopathic in its disregard for anything but itself, real-live Nazis marching in the streets, thousands of soldiers being sent to the southern border, and a seemingly endless pile of corrupt officials.

Things, in short, have changed quite a bit. And along the way, so have The Wheel Workers. Nowadays they’ve long since become a real band, and have even lost/changed a couple of key members these past couple of years, and they’ve released album after album of smart, heart-on-sleeve, politically-astute music, culminating in their fourth full-length, post-truth.

Again, though, things are decidedly different this time around. With the band’s previous album, 2015’s Citizens, I was amazed at the fire and vitriol, the fist-in-the-air punk fervor that imbued the songs — if not specifically in the music, then definitely in the lyrics and in the overall energy. And with post-truth, now fully enmeshed in the Trump Era, I figured I was in for more of the same.

At first, I thought I was correct, given that the first song on the album is the fiery, sharp-edged “White Lies,” which takes aim squarely at peddlers of deceit and inciters of violence, homing in on “the leader” whose followers believe he will “Rewind time”. Sound at all familiar?

The band gave us a preview of the song way, way back in 2016, releasing it as a 7-inch with B-side “All My Fault” just scant days before the election that would see Trump ushered into power. At the time, the song, with its retro-sci-fi fury and theremin-tinged dissonance, like The Rentals or Gary Numan bashing full-speed into Man…or Astro-man?, felt like a warning about a future that could surely, surely never actually happen.

What back then seemed a far-fetched cautionary tale, however, now feels like a clear-eyed prediction of the actual present, with a chief executive who pathologically lies about everything, even stupid, easy-to-disprove bullshit that doesn’t matter to anybody. It’s painfully apt as a lead-in to an album entitled post-truth.

But after that first track, the album itself slows down and gets more serious, more thoughtful. It segues into “Desire,” all sweet, yearning pop that wishes for a world that’s different from the one that surrounds us, one where you don’t have to worry about grown-up responsibilities like jobs and bills and all that crap.

At heart, the song is about following your dreams — the “desire” of the song’s title — in spite of reality conspiring to keep you focused on mundane, everyday things. When Higginbotham croons that it’s “[s]o easy to slip away / Turn on the TV and purchase reality,” I can’t help but feel a twinge of my own regret for far, far too many nights spent staring at the screen (or, more likely, multiple screens at the same time).

Then there’s “Doesn’t Really Matter” to hammer the point home, The Wheel Workers mourning the death of “adolescent dreams of fame” when adulthood comes around over a brilliant chunk of swooning, jangly, throwback Britpop. “How Did I Go So Wrong” slows things down even further, gentle and delicate, with possibly the best vocal performance I’ve heard yet from Higginbotham as he wonders how he got to where he is right now. It doesn’t sound like he’s talking about the state of the world, though, but about himself, surveying wreckage of his own personal life.

“Games We Play” shifts back to the political, The Wheel Workers setting their sights on con men, reality stars, exclusive resorts, and weaponized “white fear,” declaring that even if the people in power don’t truly believe the things they repeat, that it’s just a game to them, it still causes damage in the real world, to real people. It’s head-nodding, jagged, warning pop-rock that makes me think of Radiohead more than anything else, and in a very, very good way; guitarist Craig Wilkins carves out a seriously Jonny Greenwood-esque place on this album, and I’m loving it.

“Burning” is similar, a clinical, detached examination of how things fall apart, recounted without rancor or anger over a chiming, “My Iron Lung”-esque guitar line. Even when the lyrics are packed full of outrage, with Higginbotham shaking his head and saying, “Another’s pain / But you won’t do a thing / For liberty’s sake,” he sounds more resigned than angry, more disappointed in the choices made.

That anger finally leaks through again with “Nothing to Say,” a rollicking boogie (with outer space-y keys and sound effects, but still) about cutting ties with friends because of politics — or, more accurately, because of gleeful online demagogic bullshit, abusing somebody who used to be a friend just for the sake of “owning” them and the people they support.

I’m enjoying the hell out of the yell-along chorus and the Quintron-style organ sound, seriously — actually, if you squint a little harder, the whole song sounds like it could be a Quintron & Miss Pussycat track. “DC Swamp Buggy Badass,” maybe?

post-truth closes out with the beautifully bleak, haunting “Sing,” which sees Higginbotham singing, “nothing’s aligned nothing makes any sense / consumer wasteland with all souls for rent / reality TV star president,” and wondering just how far gone we really are. The piano-focused melody makes me think of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” more than anything else, and yeah, that feels pretty goddamn appropriate.

The song is full of pain and confusion and resignation, and I absolutely understand it — how the fuck did we get here? Was all of the nasty, cruel, evil shit coming out of people’s mouths always there, beneath the surface, and we were all just being polite all this time? Do Americans really not understand what the Holocaust was, or know the civil rights movement meant, or even care to bother to try to understand what it’s like to be African-American or Muslim or Jewish or gay or female in modern America?

Higginbotham, and The Wheel Workers as a whole, sound on this album like they’re struggling with those questions just like I am, and the answers aren’t good ones, aren’t reassuring ones. Trump didn’t create the way his supporters feel; he’s just channeling it, and channeling it astoundingly, horrifyingly well. So what can you do to break through to someone who’s caught up in that? Sing, is the answer, or sing, and think, and write, and try to be the best human possible. That’s all we can do.

One of the most fascinating things for me, as a guy who writes about music and sometimes gets to write about the same band multiple times over time, is to watch a band grow and evolve. And The Wheel Workers have definitely done a lot of both of those things since that first listen.

Skipping back through the band’s previous work, I feel like I’m flipping through a photo album full of different images caught in time. Unite, the “band”‘s first album, was all youth, unsure of itself and floundering, smart and with a lot of promise but unfocused; Past to Present, the followup, was the idealism of the teenage years, learning about the world and about injustice and saying that surely people would do the right things, if only they knew, right?

Citizens is the rebellion that comes after, the time in your life when you realize that things are seriously fucked-up and you think that since you’ve got youth and righteous fury on your side, you can be the one who finally takes it to The Man, in all his shapes and forms. It’s loud and brash, firm in its certainty and ready to fight.

This album, then, is adulthood. It’s about finding out that sometimes things don’t work out for the best, that sometimes the good guys don’t win — not right away, at least — and that people aren’t necessarily kind and caring like you thought they would be. The world can be a harsh place, and discovering your own place within it can be equally harsh.

That’s not to say that everything is darkness, mind you, and I doubt The Wheel Workers would think it is, either. With post-truth, the band still believes all the things it’s always believed; it’s just coming to terms with the fact that the battle for those beliefs won’t be won overnight, and will sometimes see setbacks and defeats along the way. Where Citizens was a call to arms, an anti-establishment fist raised in the air, post-truth is measured and smart, looking at the world through sober, determined eyes.

And isn’t that actually what adulthood’s about, anyway? Everybody gets knocked down sometimes, and some of those times, it hurts a hell of a lot. But you’ve got that life and those responsibilities, maybe even people who depend on you, so you have to keep going.

Fighting on for what you think and believe and need, even when you know winning will be hard to do, is the essence of being a grown-up. The key is to keep getting back on your feet.

(Feature photo by Allison McPhail.)