Wheel_____________
The Anglo-Finnish proggers tackle society’s divisions on their second album.
Anglo-Finnish group Wheel are back with their second album, which explores the divisions in our society. Vocalist and guitarist James Lascelles describes Resident Human as having a “humanistic vibe” and, he tells Prog, it really showcases the band’s hypnotic sound.
“Ithink it’s a reasonable discussion to have: how do you advance society in a way that progresses towards equality and other values that people care about?” James Lascelles is discussing his band Wheel’s new second album, Resident Human, that examines modern humanity and calls for change. Lascelles himself knows about the positivity that change can bring, given the fact that he left his home country of the UK to move to Finland on a whim 10 years ago, and played on pop music reality shows before forming Wheel in 2015.
“I was playing in a prog band in the UK but was going broke and thinking about quitting music,” Lascelles recalls. “A friend had moved to Finland and won the Idols competition [the Finnish version of Pop Idol], and he started inviting me over to play guitar with him and sing backing vocals. I took the plunge and decided to move there.”
Lascelles laughs at the memory of the music world he found himself in:
“It was pop so not my scene at all, but some of it was fun! I enjoyed looking at things like harmony arrangements, but the musical style didn’t do much for me.
“We ended up on a show called
Tartu Mikkiin, which translates to
‘Grab That Mic’, which is like a karaoke competition in Finland. I met the guitarist in that house band, who was Saku Mattila, the other founding member of Wheel.”
In this unlikely setting, Lascelles and Mattila discovered a mutual love for prog and metal, and formed Wheel. Mattila left the band amicably in 2018, and while there have been numerous line-up changes since, Lascelles has remained at the helm. And as Wheel’s sound demonstrates, he’s come a long way from pop music reality shows. Their debut album, Moving Backwards, was released in 2019 and garnered them comparisons to Tool and Karnivool, and 2020 should have been their year: they started working on a new album back in November 2019, and had their first headline tours booked, as well as dates supporting Meshuggah and Devin Townsend.
And of course, we all know what happened next.
“I’m a massive Meshuggah fan,” Lascelles says, showing Prog his Meshuggah T-shirt over Skype. “That tour was with Devin Townsend, who we also love, and it got cancelled. That would have been incredible. But in all honestly, I think the pandemic saved the album,” Lascelles admits. “We were rushing it big-time. Don’t get me wrong, the instrumentation would have been the same, but for me, vocally and lyrically, the extra time was enormously beneficial.
“I completely burned out at the start of the summer; I hit a wall, I felt awful, I couldn’t make anything good happen. I started trying to take better care of myself, meditation, a bit of yoga and exercise, and it made a big difference. Once I started doing that, this floodgate of inspiration hit me.”
Wheel had already started the music for Resident Human, and in keeping with the album’s title, Lascelles was aiming for a “humanistic vibe”:
“I think [Moving Backwards] was more processed,” Lascelles says, “but it fit the material. It was a stylistic choice; it’s not about good and bad.
“We’re living in a time where you can correct everything if you choose to: you can line up every strike of a drum, or pluck a string up to a grid and get it perfectly mathematically correct. It’s great we can do that. But for this album we really tried to pull back. It’s a much more kind of honest version of what we sound like.”
The idea of honesty is one that’s explored in the subject matter of the album, as the songs delve deep into the foibles and fragility of the human condition, often through events of 2020: from social media (Ascend) to the pandemic (Fugue) to the death of George Floyd, the African American man who was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis last summer (Movement), that sparked protests around the world.
“Movement is about the rhetoric after George Floyd was [killed], and the reaction that followed,” Lascelles explains. “How quickly it went from someone getting killed in broad daylight by the authorities that are supposed to protect the public, to a polarising and negative rhetoric dehumanising him, saying he was on drugs, things like that.”
Lascelles released a video on YouTube where he discussed the lyrics behind Movement and, as he expected, there were some negative remarks in the comments section.
“I feel like no one wants a reasonable discussion, we’ve been divided into these two factions warring with each other,” he says. “I think that getting out of our own echo chamber and
“I always wanted to make progressive music, because you’re not tied to this verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle-eightchorus format. I like the fact we can turn the whole thing on its head, and challenge it.”
talking to people on the other side is crucial. We’ve always had that; I think social media and internet algorithms have added to this division.”
Speaking as someone in a band, Lascelles finds social media a necessary evil. “It’s really brutal the critique you can get online,” he admits, “and if you start letting it get into your head, I think it messes with your ability to create. I saw an interview with Steven Wilson recently and he said you’ve got to accept the good and the bad, and as long as both are there, it’s kind of okay. I think that’s a much healthier way to look at it.”
Lascelles addresses some of the negatives on the song Ascend, in particular the ‘copy and paste’ culture of social media.
“You see a lot of people just sharing posts others have done, and I think that’s become a replacement for trying to find our own words to express difficult things,” he says. “You could argue this has been done since the dawn of time through storytelling.
But I think the internet has distorted things, we end up losing nuance and are left with these really broad sweeping brushes to cover everything. I think it’s making us less satisfied as a society, and worse at communication.
“One of the great advantages of being a musician is that we get to travel the world and meet people,” Lascelles says. “You realise then that the stuff most people care about is the same. We fixate on difference, but there’s a lot of symmetry to the human condition: we all want a roof over our heads, we want to do something we care about, to love who we love. All that’s fundamental to the human condition, as fundamental as our desire to cheat death.”
Closing the circle on the idea of the human condition, Lascelles also explores death on the 12-minute song Hyperion. The inspiration came from reading the sci-fi series Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons.
“I just came across the books, and they blew my mind,” he says. “It’s set in the future, but there are elements of our world, and the third and fourth books really contemplate the notions of mortality and death. We try to defeat it, spiritually, medically, but it’s unavoidable. I think as soon as you make peace with that, you’re just left with this sense of gratitude that we get to experience any of this, that we can have this conversation, that anyone cares about us.”
Wheel have managed to achieve the seemingly impossible: winning over both proggers and metalheads. When Prog asks Lascelles how he thinks he’s managed that, he laughs.
“I guess it’s because we don’t fit perfectly into either world,” he says. “We’re a bit heavy for prog rock, a bit melodic for prog metal. I always wanted to make progressive music, because you’re not tied to this versechorus-verse-chorus-middle-eightchorus format. I like the fact we can turn the whole thing on its head, and challenge it. Like with Movement, we were like, how crazy can we make something that’s four and a half minutes long? We just make the music we like, and we’ve made the album that we really wanted to make.”
“In all honestly, I think the pandemic saved the album. We were rushing it big-time.”
Resident Human is out on March 26 via Odyssey Music. See www.wheelband.net.