The Turning Wheel, Spellling’s third full length album, is a fantastical departure from the synth driven records before it. Featuring over 30 musicians, the album feels plucked from another time, or maybe from outside of time.
The Turning Wheel, according to the artist behind Spellling, Chrystia Cabral, “revolves around themes of human unity, the future, divine love and the enigmatic ups and downs of being a part of this carnival called life.” Split into two sections, Above and Below, the album navigates these themes first with a sense of wonder, then with a darker tone.
On the first side, Above, I was surprised by just how joyful the songs could sound. “Little Deer” is flowy and fantastical - horns lend a big band jazziness, while the harp adds a dreamy texture to underlie the song. “Always” feels inspired by doo-wop ballads, singing “Please don’t steal my heart” while a bass plucks under strings and horns.
To me, the big standout track of the album is the title track. “The Turning Wheel” is anthemic. Tonally, it sounds like it came straight out of the early 70s. The piano, backed up by organ, guitar, strings, and horns, builds to a joyous mid-track solo that invokes a feeling of people laying in fields of flowers. This, paired with Cabral’s fantastic vocal delivery, makes us believe that maybe we can, in fact, break out of the Turning Wheel of life, step out of time, and transcend to a new state of being.
“The Future” is the most theatrical feeling song on the album. It is easy to imagine this track performed in a musical play, perhaps where the lead is discovering a latent magical ability that has been hiding within them. “Awaken” continues this theatrical feeling. The vocal delivery and organs paired together, with the climbing percussion and horns, are the first steps to beginning a journey that will change you forever; a crossing of the threshold in sort of Campbellian terms (as a note, this is not an endorsement of Joseph Campbell’s ideas of monomyth, moreso an acknowledgement of his influence on modern storycraft).
With the track “Boys at School” we have fully submerged into the Below. Darker tones reign from this point forward - pianos dance in minor keys, and the formerly flamboyant horns now feel more somber. The boys never play by the rules, and we hear a grasping at youth and innocence sure to be lost. The following track, “Legacy,” is a sort of seductive haunting; rolling strings and plucky synths backed by a Latin percussion section invite you in. Cabral sings “I’ll crawl, I’ll crawl, into the daylight” to find a frightening legacy.
While Below is darker, and less fantastical than Above, it also feels connected to change. In the Above section, we are in the dream world; we see the unity and divine love from Cabral’s statement. In Below, there is action: “I draw my sword from the sorrow,” “too far to turn back now,” “I’m in a permanent revolution.” Reality is painful. It can feel like we’re trapped on this Turning Wheel with no way off, no way to stop the repeating revolutions of the sun. But this reality is also where we explore how we can bring ourselves closer to our dreams and to each other. There’s a hope in the darkness of Below that we can find our own pieces of the utopian Above. It’s a theme that could easily come off as corny, but through Spellling’s fantastic and fantastical writing, it comes off as sincere and heartfelt.
The Turning Wheel is available now on Bandcamp and through Sacred Bones.