Album Review: CQ Wrestling - 'Resistance'
There are plenty of surprises to be found on the new album from the Brighton band now trading as CQ Wrestling. Chief among them is the fact that it exists at all; a perfect storm of grief, burnout and music industry fatigue threatened to derail the whole damn project a couple of years ago. Charlie Woods and Jake Mac should have been on top of the world after 2023’s debut album Plus Ultra made good on seven years of promises, but barely a year later they were sitting in the pub, earnestly considering pulling the plug. The solution, as it turned out, was to hit reset and forge ahead under a new name with a new sound. This both is and isn’t the Chappaqua Wrestling we knew.
Resistance is a fitting title for a record forged from adversity; 2024 also saw Mac lose his father, who served as the band’s first manager. That crucial pub meeting convinced them to ‘really fucking fight to keep this thing going’, and so the album opens with the fiery ‘Pacifico’, a song that’s an order of magnitude more urgent than anything on its predecessor and sets the tone for a record whose painful gestation scoffs at the ‘difficult second album’ cliché. This is a record that serves as a tear-soaked tribute as much as it fits the mould of rebuking the toxic creative environment that almost suffocated them. “I’m on the path to change” Woods insists, and across the album’s 11 songs he makes good on that promise.
Out with the Britpop tinges that characterised their debut, replaced by heavier influences that reflect searching lyrical content. ‘Catherine Wheels’ may bring to mind the near-namesake Great Yarmouth band for listeners of a certain vintage, but the song swerves closer to shoegaze than you’d expect; the full band crashes in with force you can feel in your chest. It’s fittingly full of fireworks, and the band’s first song released under their new name is recontextualised as an emotional release after ‘Finish Line’ brings to mind Doves at their noisiest and most affecting. They’ve absorbed that kind of washed-out sound incredibly well: ‘HEALTH+’ offers a more energetic, tightly syncopated spin on it that sounds like you’re listening through freshly blown speakers. ‘I won’t lose this time,’ indeed - a line that’s delivered like Woods knows it’s simply not an option.
There’s an element of chaos here that’s impossible to ignore, audible in the way ‘Innocence’ swings between pensive verses and its explosive chorus. ‘Are we grinning through the pain?’ the band ask, right before confronting industry bullshit on ‘Smoke Screen’, a noted musical and lyrical left turn that serves as the first genuine curveball on the record. ‘Grinning through the pain’ is just as important as the physical and emotional resistance that gave the album its title; the pair are clearly having fun with this, even if the likes of ‘Guns In Their Hands’ and the heartwrenching ‘Shine Not Burn’ are clearly birthed from difficult circumstances.
Woods and Mac were shooting skyward on the cover for Plus Ultra, finding themselves crashing to earth not long thereafter, but Resistance is the sound of a band picking themselves up and starting again, in a manner that grips you for 43 minutes and doesn’t let go until closer ‘Soft Top’ is left to fade into the ether. Cathartic, intense, absolutely vital - to think it almost didn’t exist at all. They got to start over a decade in, and CQ Wrestling have seized the moment with a staggeringly powerful album that will linger in the memory long after it’s over.
Words by Gareth O'Malley
