AMERICAN PANCAKE: The Wheel Workers and double time, cagey beauty and sadness of "Harbor"

"your secret’s safe with me / you think you don’t belong / you’re too hard on yourself..."

photo by daniel jackson

There is something so beautiful about The Wheel Workers' edgy and translucent "Harbor". It also doesn't hurt that it is dripping with cool. For me, the double time keys, and artful cagey drums with the sort of stop and star cadence and rapid fills creates an open framework for pushed passionate vox that have a kind of Michael Stipe-esque purity. When big bass lines, vibrato guitars and synth walls rise up only to have this sort of spacey lo-fi organ sing a lead melody "Harbor" pushes art punk buttons. There is a sadness to the melodies and to the painfully drawn lyrics, "you sell yourself so short / that you can’t be loved / you’ve been broken so long".

The bands says that [“Harbor” is about people who have gone through a difficult time finding solace in one another. It was originally very personal in nature, but the strange times we've all been living through have imbued the lyrics with new meaning.]

We are living in arduous even horrific times but good people endure, they always have in the end.

-Robb Donker Curtius