Nathan Nicholson leads The Boxer Rebellion live at the London Forum, October 2013 (Photo: Andy Crossland for Live4ever Media)
About half way through this gig, one of my companions casually asked: “So, what do you think The Boxer Rebellion sound like?”
As innocently as it was couched, it’s a question usually designed to send music writers into apoplexy, a query which demands some sort of mind-blowing insight by response, as if your scribe is a master of the art form like Lester Bangs and Simon Reynolds squared. Under the circumstances there was little to do other than bluff and reply that I’d ‘have to think something up’. As cop outs go, this one was almost total.
Twenty years ago the answer might have been easier: stadium rock. The quartet – American singer Nathan Nicholson, Australian guitarist Todd Howe plus Englishmen Adam Harrison and Piers Hewitt (bass and drums respectively) – collectively make the sort of noise high on emotional resonance and full of melody, a whole designed to gets bums off expensive seats. These days however it’s a term which has some fairly unwelcome connotations, specifically around bombast and lazy, war cry vacuousness, so now with no little hint of irony their handle is more often than not that heinous coverall ‘Indie’.
Thinking big may have become a dirty word in some circles, so it’s appropriate that tonight we’re in Leeds Brudenell Social Club, a venue about as far from having all the brown M&M’s removed from your rider as possible. The crowd inside the 350 capacity venue (a near sell-out – which is good news given that the band are label-less and effectively self employed) is humming with twenty and thirty somethings in anticipation of the group’s first proper UK tour in three years, having chewed on 2013’s album ‘Promises‘ for more than long enough.
Their wait was ended as four unassuming looking men took to the boards with ‘The Runner‘, a barb thrown out from their otherwise gently epic third album ‘The Cold Still‘. A less then obvious starter, it’s a scramble of nervous post punk energy which bleeds straight into Semi-Automatic, grittier, less immediate but as hard edged. Hearing this less than fist pumping beginning, the audience are left to wonder: Are these then now serious young men? It’s cold outside in Leeds’ cosmopolitan student area, but should we have brought raincoats and angst, be Ian Curtis in the iPhone latitudes?
Answer: No. Nicholson is no Bono, but he warms to his task, obviously pleased that absence seems to have made the city’s audience grow fonder. The singer has spoken before of the band’s early moments, in which they had barely 45 minutes of material to play, but now the setlist criss-crosses adeptly around a back catalogue with reassuring depth. Songs then; ‘New York‘s tri-partite percussion, the electric poise of ‘Surrounded‘, ‘Diamonds‘ and its tales of guilt and remorse set to a diaphanous, 80’s synth backdrop the sort of which has made White Lies and a dozen other bands rich and almost famous.
Amongst all this undertow and empathy there’s still the spectacle of men old enough to know better bouncing from foot to foot awkwardly at the front. Awkward certainly, but West Yorkshire’s politest mosh pit is broken up when Nicholson leads an impromptu acapella version of ‘Lean On Me‘ with the crowd before the thudding psychedelic heft of ‘Watermelon‘ manages to sound every bit as majestic as Richard Ashcroft in his pomp, Hewitt hitting the drums as if they were incoming snakes.
It’s a reminder that once the band stood at the verge of being stars, at least for the day, before imploding labels sent them back to square one. To their credit there’s no sense of bitterness despite the fact that first encore ‘Always‘ is as close to the jugular of pop as they’ve ever been; ‘Locked In The Basement‘ and ‘The Gospel of Goro Adachi‘ follow, both rolling in like waves, full of tension and grace.
So, after all that, what do The Boxer Rebellion sound like? Well tonight my friends, they sounded bloody brilliant.
