Indiana upstarts Native flirt with the brand of post-hardcore that's become the standard at alternative radio, combining it with a more pointedly progressive sound. Evoking the feral angst of button-pushers like the Blood Brothers and more notably proggy acts like At the Drive-In and Coheed and Cambria, Native don't move too far in either direction. So Wrestling Moves, their debut LP, is gussied up to sound more epic than it actually is. While it occasionally hits a stride with an invigorating surge of punked-up thrash, more often the album is it nullified with arbitrary transitions and tempo shifts that leave Native with too much space and little to fill it with.
It's pointless to talk about individual tracks here, since there is so little distinction between them. While the approach may have meant to create a uniform sound for the record, there's a difference between trying to establish a thread and making it nearly impossible to tell one cut from the other. Each squall of anxiety-ridden, teenage disquietude as embodied in lead singer's Bobby Markos' shredded screech is always followed with a tempo change that leaves the song feeling sprawled-out and motionless, colored only by a limp toss of a few pallid guitar melodies into the mix. Instead of building and releasing structures or employing a memorable hook, the band simply moves back and forth between these two points for the entirety of the album. A few cuts apply some interesting ambient guitar interplay, but there's very little divergence throughout.
Native show some potential. These Arms Are Snakes drummer Chris Common nicely handles production duties, and wisely anchors most of the material around drummer Nick Glassen, who sometimes is able to save otherwise bland retreads with terse syncopations. But Wrestling Moves winds up feeling inert, suggesting that Native might have only one move after all.
