Live Review: The Boxer Rebellion at London Oslo


The Boxer Rebellion live at the London Oslo. May 2016. (Photo: Andy Crossland for Live4ever Media)

The Boxer Rebellion live at the London Oslo. May 2016. (Photo: Andy Crossland for Live4ever Media)




The one person you really don’t want to piss off before playing a gig is the guy that operates the smoke machine. The dark movers on stage sure look and sound like The Boxer Rebellion, but it’s hard to fathom a face through all the opaque mist glued in the air for large portions of tonight’s (May 3rd) show upstairs at Oslo in Hackney.

As long as we look cool, hopes singer Nathan Nicholson after attesting to his own band’s struggle at seeing the crowd barely a hopscotch away. To the eye, there is a certain cool assurity about The Boxer Rebellion in the way they each bop around in their own little spheres of fun. One that comes with the rooted territory of being around for nearly as long as Coldplay – a band they are indeed indebted when playing old songs like ‘We Have This Place Surrounded‘ – but without the half-time Super Bowl kind of stardom that singing about yellow affords you.

Still, their songs’ seemingly endless amount of TV show-soundtracking across the pond at least one day might flourish into some kind of half-time commercial fame. Because make no mistake, the band’s noise is shelf-ready packaged for prime-time markets, if the prime-timers will ever listen. And it’s big. Too big in fact for this modest-sized venue to comfortably girdle. After all, this is the East End, home of anti-labels on used wooly tops, coffee and anything else buyable, remember? So in a way, the band being effectively unsigned for the last decade makes them fit in perfectly, paradoxically.

The emotion tacked on to ‘Let’s Disappear‘ and ‘Big Ideas‘, both songs from the new sleek sound of their latest album ‘Ocean By Ocean‘, is overwhelming to transfixing up so close. Nobody here watching shifts much all night. Between numbers, as if to fill up the dead air that Nicholson hasn’t quite got the chat for, gusts of woohs pop up somewhere then reappear elsewhere like a whack-a-mole arcade game with unlimited credit.

Nicholson’s vocals are undeniably good though. ‘Pull Yourself Together‘ sounds so cherubic that the band feels in danger of sprouting wings and flying off, and when he’s not twiddling on his keyboard or on his guitar, Nicholson’s being the epitome of pop-frontmanism and encouraging a lot of handclaps or going solo with his mic down amongst the audience, starring in their selfies as he sings the addictively mournful ‘No Harm‘.

Guitarist Andrew Smith, the newest member after replacing Todd Howe in 2014 and with arms far too chiseled for a band, and bassist Adam Harrison pull together on percussion for ‘New York‘. Along with drummer Piers Hewitt, verified alive and real for the first time now the smoke has sunk to a fine haze, the endorphin-effort of this tribal triple-banger feels like the kind of attempt they’ve put into their whole career, but without the payoff they’d like.

They are all too aware of it when Nicholson comments on how they’ve never won an award, or are ever likely to, and that playing here is great because it means they can perform in front of people they know. Friends, family, management, of course fans. The source of some of the whooing inadvertently revealed, an extended version of ‘The Gospel Of Goro Adachi‘ at the end rips eardrums, verging on peak decibel toleration – sweetly, one might add.

The mini-revelation pervades that well-wrought, big songs can also be found in the smallest of places.

(Steven White)


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