The duo wer teamed with guitarist Joe Baiza, another veteran of the South Bay punk scene, and poet Dan McGuire, who spearheaded the project on his own dime after a long friendship with Watt, along with guest Jack Brewer, Baiza's bandmate in Saccharine Trust. The band recorded The Way Things Work in a single marathon session at a San Pedro studio in August 2003 with Baiza and McGwire producing the album for Chicago-based Smog Veil Records, which released the album a little over two years later.
McGuire's poetry is very evocative, providing fascinating vignettes of gritty street life (he's from Toledo, an old industrial city), unusual and puzzling situations, and a delivery that is filled with irony and a world-weary tone. Behind him, Baiza plays trebly meandering lines and riffs and McGuire has said he put together the band and recruited Watt and Hurley so the guitarist could burst out with high energy playing, which didn't really happen on the record, but it was, after all, a one-day improvisational experiment.
Watt, a master at accompaniment, lays down solid grooves and interpolations in his distinctive fashion, and Hurley keeps things moving briskly by ranging through his kit with strength and a tasty range of color and texture on the traps, cymbals and bass drums. On his tracks, Brewer's voice projects a trembly fragility and, interestingly, a sense of lightness even with the dark matter of the poetry.
Even as a first-take experiment melding poetry and improvised music that was channeled in a different and more effective way on the band's second album, The Master's Voice (look for it in a future post), The Way Things Work does work pretty well, embodying what Baiza has referred to as the "sentiment and the spirit" of the exploration of punk rock, even as it sounds very different from common expectations of what that should be.
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