Winged Wheel

Winged Wheel are blessed classic-rock revivalists, if your version of classic rock happens to span Can and Cluster, Faust and My Bloody Valentine, The Velvet Underground and Flying Saucer Attack. The band spooled out of a pandemic-era lark, when Spray Paint’s Cory Plump encouraged Tyvek’s Fred Thomas to send him some drum loops over which he might riff. The DMs began spiraling, with Whitney Johnson—the mastermind of the great Matchess and a collaborator to the likes of Lia Kohl and Circuit des Yeux—and guitar dynamo Matthew J. Rolin eventually weaving their own remote sound files into the mix. Winged Wheel’s 2022 debut, No Island, was a riveting and sprawling rock ’n’ roll record, a testament to what four kindred spirits with sudden time on their hands could accomplish online, together but apart.

The quartet thankfully recognized their chemistry and chose to expand upon it, rather than consider No Island some one-off experiment. They subsequently rendezvoused in Hudson, New York, recruiting two fellow long-form rock travelers—Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and Water Damage’s Lonnie Slack—for three days of open-ended and ultra-productive sessions. Stitched together from careful edits and imaginative structuring, Big Hotel is the result of a great rock band locking itself in a room, closing its eyes, and opening its ears. “Grief in the Garden” puts major motorik drums beneath dream-pop bliss, while “Soft Hands” suggests some vintage Motown reels run through the tape machine until the layers start to slough off. Winged Wheel’s live appearances remain rare, with their Big Ears arrival marking just their second Southeastern show.