[rating=8.00]
Two years ago the Scottish musician Gary McClure released Wreaths, an album he’s convinced that no one ever heard, under his actual name. He has since become someone else. He left the U.K. for the U.S., got a wife and two dogs, cut a handful of songs to 8-track tape, and blasted copies to music writers under the pseudonym American Wrestlers.
“Unfortunately you can’t just say, ‘Hey, here’s some great music, listen to this,’” McClure, 29, recently told Glide on the phone from St. Louis. “It’s almost like a guy meeting a woman, and she hides the fact that she’s got kids already, you know what I mean? And it completely worked.” The remark reflects his frustration and impatience with how independent music can vanish before it is ever heard. And his exercise in self-promotion suggests that, in some cases, it takes little more than a vague email to nudge writers into curiosity. If they wanted a story, he’d give them a story. They bit, and so did the labels. McClure eventually signed with Fat Possum, remaining anonymous until recently, when many of the writers he contacted last year began calling for interviews.
This painstaking, if indulgent, marketing effort followed many months locked away alone in a bedroom, recording with cheap analog equipment and pouring everything into intensive multi-tracking sessions. The production approach mirrors McClure’s reckoning with ego, itself the prevailing theme of American Wrestlers. Throughout the album he grapples with what could have been with his last one; he’s not through mourning the flop that it was. Yet Wreaths was everything American Wrestlers is not: lushly arranged and meticulously produced. This time we get something rugged and raw. In spite of himself, McClure’s crackles and naked clicks are beauty marks, rather than side effects, of a sonically crude project enhanced by its rugged piano and guitar loops. His guts are all over the place as he accepts the futility of obsessing over commercial shortcomings. This is most evident in the gloom of the opening track, “There’s No One Crying Over Me Either.” “All human beings want prestige,” McClure told Glide of the song’s meaning. “They want to be understood and loved and noticed.”
It’s hard to understand McClure’s lyrics within the wobbly, wow-and-flutter context of a record put to worn tape. But the mood swings of his songs often say more than his words. Self-harmonies and reverb-laden hooks drive “The Rest of You,” even if much of it is indecipherable. And the snarling guitar lick of “Kelly,” based on the acquittal of two cops who beat a homeless man to death in 2011, conveys more anger than McClure’s voice does, even with a refrain that sounds eerily closer to “killing” than “Kelly.”
American Wrestlers is a pained slice of autobiography, but there is hope for healing in its next chapter. “I won’t be left behind,” McClure repeats on “Left” toward the end of the album. “I’ve got my own sentimental life to live.”
