Let’s Wrestle – Nursing Home album review

If you’re in the twenty-something to thirty-something age range and are in the mood for a bit of nostalgia, check out Nursing Home, the sophomoric release from London’s Let’s Wrestle.  From the moment you hit play, visions of the nineties’ second half will ring through your head—Weezer, Green Day, No Use For a Name, even some of the earlier Blink 182 is in there.  

Producer Steve Albini’s characteristically minimalist recording style and pushed back vocal tracks works well with the bands unpretentious pop riffs, and we hear a sound that would have fit onto those old Fat Wreck Chords compilations, or even a Punk-o-Rama.   But that was almost fifteen years ago.  While the pumped up fuzz of Albini’s production takes the album a step toward something heavier, it is difficult not to listen and think that we’ve already heard this before, nostalgia or no.  

With lyrics about battling Pokemon (“In Dreams Part II”) and a smattering of fairly generic comments about the boredom of being a youth in the suburbs, singer/guitarist Wesley Patrick Gonzalas’ sense of humor has maintained a bland subject matter since the band’s previous release.  

Musically Nursing Home displays a lack of risks that one hopes an artist would venture to take along a progressing career.  This is not to say that it’s devoid of catchy tunes, it simply feels that the band is standing still instead of pressing forward.