The Boxer Rebellion - The Second I'm Asleep: Album Review

Artwork for the boxer rebellion album the second i'm asleep

4 stars hq

On ‘The Second I’m Asleep’, The Boxer Rebellion again resist any temptation to stray far from their emotionally resonant brand of grown-up indie rock and dream pop.

The second track on The Boxer Rebellion’s seventh album The Second I’m Asleep is titled Last Of A Dying Breed, and it’s tempting to think of the quartet using that as a metaphor for their state of mind.

Over two decades on from the release of their debut Exits in 2004, they feel more anomalous than ever, a perennial swimmer up the rivers of both contemporary song craft and the music industry itself.

Their fiercely loyal cabal of fans know the story, but you might not. Without a label not long after Exits was released, they pioneered the self-releasing model and – along side canny licensing deals with the producers of Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree Hill and Skins – they’ve since managed a career with longevity far in excess of their peers.

Their line up – American Nathan Nicholson plus Adam Harrison, Piers Hewitt and Andrew Smith – has remained familiar over the decades too, a continuity that allows them to go such long periods between records (their last was 2018’s Ghost Alive) whilst retaining their uniqueness.

On The Second I’m Asleep, The Boxer Rebellion again resist any temptation to stray far from their emotionally resonant brand of grown-up indie rock and dream pop, a sound which Future Islands aside has few current peers.

As the record’s lyrics reveal, Nicholson is also an observer of and at times unwilling participant in twenties’ culture. These feelings of inner conflict are most obvious on Satellite Above, on which his keening falsetto helps to skewer the balloon of a life being lived totally for others.

As the guitars meander and refuse to fully show themselves, his dystopian warning is against the notion of surveillance as a mental stimulus: “Big brother always watching over / A satellite above.”

Overt polemic however is for other bands. Even in the comparative despair there is an obvious want for solace.

On This House the drums shuffle breathlessly whilst foggy notes swim from background to foreground, the words of salvaging something, about drawing strength from unexpected places, of finding a way to trust.

If this all sounds a little like snippets from therapy, The Boxer Rebellion have also long mastered the art of hanging back in the ether.

It’s a quality on which Second Guess is built on, the song’s trippy, skeletal body ready to soundtrack a road trip without a road.

Closer Your Side Of Town meanwhile feels like a poignant ceremony of the forgotten, solemn piano and marching band drums lying quiet for words made fragile and vulnerable.

Whimsy like that in these circumstances is a rare and archaic quality, but in even more short supply is the ability for us to admit that the things which hurt us most have been self-afflicted.

On Hidden Meanings this ugly phenomenon is writ large; beginning with the confessional line, “I no longer wish you dead”, the twinkling, reverb-soaked backdrop is a thought boat which soberly, finally, floats on this stark realisation.

Maybe that’s the thing sets us all free; folding up and putting away the mental picnic blanket of guilt is the theme of opener Flowers In The Water, the kind of anthemic, last-song-in-an-almost-empty-nightclub singalong to nobody that can’t be measured in mere serotonin production alone.

As for The Boxer Rebellion? Is The Second I’m Asleep one last comet before they finally recede into the outer reaches of the music verse for good?

The words of Last Of A Dying Breed tells the story for them. “You’re the last of a dying breed/Still with so much to achieve/Trying to breathe new life into a dying dream.”

Amen to that.