REVIEW: Let's Wrestle—In The Court Of Wrestling Let's (2009)
Warm appreciation for the storming debut from Wesley Patrick Gonzalez's effervescent and bafflingly overlooked band.
I’m not one to let a band wither on the vine, but that’s exactly what happened with Let’s Wrestle, who were active for a solid decade from 2005 to 2015. Despite even living in London at the time, where they were based, they totally passed me by. Bugger.
It wasn’t until the ever-reliable Marc Riley played one of their tunes a few years back on his evening show on 6Music that I was stopped in my tracks. How had this band escaped my attention for so long? Well, dear reader, it’s mostly down to the appointed tastemakers, the playlist committee, the curators of the scene, and their baffling selection process, that sees top class bands and artists continually passed over for blander, less interesting alternatives. But that’s another story. The good news is I found them in the end.
The matter at hand is their debut album In The Court Of Wrestling Let's, a jovial nod to King Crimson’s beloved prog debut from 1969. Of course, their particular brand of punchy and spirited indie rock couldn’t be much further away from KC’s prog noodling, bearing more resemblance to up-and-at-’em jangly 80s and 90s UK indie, like The Wedding Present or for a more contemporary comparison, The Bug Club.
The track most people will likely remember is the single, We Are The Men You’ll Grow To Love Soon, (heard in the Shameless TV show), a mosh-ready song that proves, yet again, that a bunch of judiciously placed “ba-ba-ba’s” are all you really need to chart a course to your heart. Why this never became an indie staple, I really do not know. Total banger.
But this record is stuffed to the gills with similarly joyous earworms. Opener My Arms Don’t Bend That Way, Damn It! gets things off to a roaring start, and things keep firing from there, with I’m In Love With Destruction underlining what any debut record should aim to do: deliver a manifesto for your very existence that makes people want to jump around.
On this mighty 16-track album, there’s little to criticise. If you were lucky enough to see the band around this time, it must have been a dizzying exercise. I hope one day they feel sufficiently nostalgic to do a few reunion shows, and frontman Wesley Gonzalez gets tired of doing solo shows for bit. I feel like one of those idiots who missed out on Pixies the first time around, lamenting that I’d never get the chance to see them again. And look at how that turned out. ]
Getting hold of this record on vinyl, though, has been a multi-year project. Just 300 copies were pressed up on Stolen Recordings 16 years ago, at a time when the vinyl revival was still a twinkle in the greedy corporate’s dollar-signed eyes. Back then, I recall my local indie Resident had a cursory couple of racks in a tiny unit, and only in London could you reliably find anywhere with a useful vinyl presence. Indie bands mostly pressed these up for selling at gigs. I had to go as far as buying this one from the USA, and goodness knows how it ended up there.
The other strange thing about this record is you can’t even stream it. It’s absent from Spotify. Only a few songs are on YouTube. You can’t even buy a digital download off Bandcamp. I don’t know why this excellent album has ended up in some sort of rights hellhole, but for now it’s one you’ll likely have to track down on CD to even hear it at all. But trust me on this: you won’t regret it.
