Bands like Wheat exist purely to confuse: they drift around for years, changing their name slightly, losing members, jumping from album to album. The worst thing is, it’s all been done with barely a whimper to be heard. For a group more than 10 years old, with three albums already under their belt, a few record contracts come-and-gone, Wheat are, with Everyday I Said a Prayer…, still starting from scratch with many listeners, including myself. There is, however, a great deal of ‘cred’ in the Wheat camp: in their days as wheat*, they had a song on a Cameron Crowe film soundtrack (albeit the soundtrack to the pretty crappy film, ‘Elizabethtown’), and played with some nice indie musos like Liz Phair. Now, minus the * – a rather superfluous little piece of quasi-punctuation that was the ‘!’ before the ‘!’ became a popular little band-name inclusion (see stellastarr*) – onto their fourth album, signed with Empyrean records, Wheat sees the light of day again.

The most prominent sound on Everyday I Said a Prayer… is made by vocalist Scott Levesque. His voice, somewhere between Wayne Coyne and Thom Yorke, with the former’s propensity for missing notes and the latter’s lackadaisical tone, is the centerpiece. In ‘Little White Dove’, the song concludes with a strange, multi-track vocal line that runs in so many directions it’s tough to make out whether each voice is in fact Levesque, or the words he is actually singing; some sung, some spoken, the vocal parts are, for a man with little apparent talent for singing, a brilliantly engaging use of voice. When he struggles to hit a note in ‘I Had Angels Watching Over Me’, it’s one of many moments when you question Levesque’s choice to sing at all, but there’s an element of respect to be given when he lays bare his flaws and harmonises, layers and canons these shaky vocal lines. He may be warbling around like nobody’s business, but this man knows how to deliver with what he’s got.

As far as lyrics go, the album offers little profundity. In ‘Closeness’, Levesque sings the direct and appealing lines: “you mean so much more to me than anything”; over a ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ organ part, and harmonized by an off-key falsetto, these words take on a desperate tone, one that suggests they represent a plea for emotional reciprocation rather than a declaration of love. While some lyrics are extremely clichéd – “the things that you love should be set free,” in ‘Move=Move’ for example – the sentiment is there, and it’s an honest and effective one.
 
The rhythm section is primarily that which drives the band’s ‘weirdness’ factor. At times unsettling and seemingly loose and off-beat, Brendan Harney’s drumming is idiosyncratic, with psychedelic ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’-type influences, but undeniably controlled. Oppressive and surprisingly frantic in the otherwise balladic ‘Closeness’, while echoing hand-claps in the confusing folk/grunge ‘Little White Dove’ and spasmodically appearing in the song’s primarily ‘a capella’ conclusion, Harney’s mission is both rhythmic and textual: he drives a song, whilst not shying away from an opportunity to add a beat here or there to create atmosphere. The raw production works in Harney’s favour. Although initially the tinny drum sound may turn you off, and may make many up-and-coming producers cringe, it adds to the simple feel of the songs: they may at times be experimental, at other times incoherent as ‘songs’, there’s an undercurrent of simple, emotional energy in each song, and the simple rhythm section brings all the synth and left-of-field nonsense back to earth.

Everyday I Said a Prayer… has its moments of glory. In ‘I Had Angels Watching Over Me’, there’s a clumsily executed, yet extremely catchy little vocal melody; in ‘Init .005 (formerly a case of…)’ there’s a nice undercurrent of synth string sounds and a great marching drum offset by a harmonised guitar riff; in ‘Saint In Law’, you are saved from the Enya vibe of it’s opening by a vocal/glockenspiel melody underwritten beautifully by swirling synth; ‘To, As In Addressing The Grave’ has the lushness of a Sigur Ros, whilst maintaining Wheat’s garage feel; and the chorus of ‘An Exhausted Fixer’ is a psychedelic/grunge mix, almost making up for the near-unbearable spoken-word verses.

For all these moments, however, there’s a sense of the unremarkable about Wheat’s effort. They may have covered a lot of bases on this record – from grunge, to folk, to dream-pop, to emo punk – but Wheat have failed to really capture anything more than one moment of greatness at a time.