Winged Wheel began as a tape-trading collective, with each member passing along the recording and adding a little something. That served well for the band's first album. The second album, Big Hotel, was an in-person affair, as is this third set. In the meantime, the band has managed to tour and refine its cosmic improv feel. Think something between the hurl of Storm and Stress and the wide-open spaces of Dirty Three (including fiddle, sometimes) and you're trending in the right direction.

Winged Wheel Desert So Green (12XU)

The lack of an obvious sense of direction is what defines a Winged Wheel piece. I believe most, if not all, of these songs began life as improvisations. After a lot of exploration and streamlining, these songs found their recorded form.

But don't expect to hear them played this way live. This collective seems primed for adventure, and any live outing is more likely to meadner much further afield than what is captured here. My feeling is that Winged Wheel is more of a concept than anything else. If you're not down with that, too bad.

The concept, of course, is put talented musicians together and see what happens. The pieces here poke and prod at a wide variety of ideas, never settling down into any particular groove. The sound can shift from soothing to jarring in an instant. In fact, such changes are a defining feature. And while this fits quite nicely into that "post-rock" description, at times Winged Wheel approaches "post-music". The apocalypse never sounded so grounded.

Jon Worley