American Wrestlers

Roy Thomas Baker once opined that a lousy recording of a hit song was still a hit song, and as lo-fi pioneers like Guided by Voices, Smog, and the Mountain Goats have shown us in the past, if you have the right tunes, a low-tech home-brewed production can do as much to bring out their virtues as a few months at a $500-an-hour studio with a handful of first-call session musicians. The debut album from American Wrestlers confirms that the lo-fi aesthetic is still going strong in the 21st century; Gary McClure, formerly of Working for a Nuclear Free City, built a makeshift home studio centered around a Tascam eight-track cassette deck he found at a pawnshop after relocating to St. Louis, Missouri, and the result is one of the best crummy-sounding pop albums of recent memory. Unlike many nascent lo-fi artists, McClure was already well-versed on the finer points of songwriting and performing before he began putting these tunes on tape, but he was also shrewd enough to play to the strengths