Let's Wrestle by Let's Wrestle

Let’s Wrestle did the difficult third album with their second album, Nursing Home. Mike Lightning’s sledgehammer bass and Wesley Patrick Gonzalez’s furious guitar worked against each other like the blades of a pair of scissors. If, as their debut single claimed, they wished that they were in Husker Du, then that seemed to be the manic, melodic mayhem that would take them to hardcore heaven.

But where Let’s Wrestle early records had - maybe through sheer exuberance over expertise - sounded wonderfully like songs collapsing, Nursing Home sounded like the band itself collapsing. And they did. This third album features a new line-up and reverses the anarchic vim of I Wish I Was In Husker Du; instead of "the death of an indiepop fan" it's the rebirth of one.

“I could sound like Neutral Milk Hotel,” Wes claimed on I Wish I Was In Husker Du - incidentally, if there was a better single in 2007, I’d love to hear it - and later singles I Won’t Lie To You and I’m So Lazy suggested that with those tunes, he probably could.

This eponymous third album shows that he can sound like the elegant Elephant 6 modern psychedelia of Neutral Milk Hotel and, more accurately, Beulah. It shows that Let’s Wrestle can sound like the Lovin’ Spoonful (the complexities of young love rued and celebrated in under 3 minutes), that they can do grand orchestral pop like The Zombies (melancholy and melodrama in equal measure) and they can, like The Kinks, write about their London friends and lovers in Islington Green and on Queensbridge Road.

This is as much the rebirth of an indiepop fan as it is an album by a fan of psychedelic pop. I'm filing my copy between Odessey & Oracle and When Your Heartstrings Break.



Let's Wrestle is out on Feb 10.