By Mary Chang on Tuesday, 14th November 2017 at 6:00 pm
We are coming up to International Men’s Day on the 19th of November, and the Boxer Rebellion have released a poignant new single. In the accompanying video for ‘Love Yourself’, frontman Nathan Nicholson returns Maryville, Tennessee as he contemplates a life that could have been. They have released this promo to support men’s anti-suicide charity the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), which yours truly once contributed articles to.
About the single, Nicholson said to NME, “In this age of connectivity, for all its celebration and wonderment, it seems impossible to not be just as affected by the suffering of others, whether those in trouble are close to you or not. Every day our papers are filled with heart-breaking stories of loss due to natural causes, forced displacement, ill physical and/or mental health, or, indeed, victimisation at the hands of others. ‘Love Yourself’ is a song about all of these things – drawing primarily from my own experiences. My intention when I wrote the song was to try and deliver hope in the face of hopelessness, albeit during a moment of deep self-reflection.” To read more of Nicholson’s thoughts on their band’s powerful new single, go here. ‘Love Yourself’ is a preview of ‘Ghost Alive’, The Boxer Rebellion’s new album that’s on the horizon. To read more on this band on TGTF, we’ve got some older pieces on them back here.
By Mary Chang on Tuesday, 8th October 2013 at 10:00 am
Would you like a free mp3 from The Boxer Rebellion? Today is your lucky day. Grab ‘I Fell in Love’ by signing up for the band’s mailing list in the widget below. No muss, no fuss.
By Mary Chang on Wednesday, 10th April 2013 at 6:00 pm
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from them. But here is the promo video for ‘Diamonds’, the first single from The Boxer Rebellion‘s fourth album, coming out on the 14th of May. The track is itself is poppy and the vocals ethereal. (The guitars remind me of a Keane song, oddly…) Watch it below.
By Mary Chang on Thursday, 9th June 2011 at 6:00 pm
Watching the Boxer Rebellion‘s new video for ‘The Runner’, their new single out on the 27th of June, is like watching a mini-film. You get glimpses of a life that is, as the first word of the song states emphatically…”different”.
The video has been tagged as inappropriate for minors on YouTube, so I’m posting the Vimeo version to get around the age restriction. (It might be NSFW – you have been warned.) I’ve watched the video and haven’t found the two actresses doing anything you haven’t seen a man and a woman do in a music video. However, I suppose if a brief shot of an uncovered breast and/or lesbian lovers kissing and dancing on a rooftop somehow offend you, then you best skip this one.
By Mary Chang on Friday, 3rd June 2011 at 10:00 am
The Boxer Rebellion are getting ready to release a new single, ‘The Runner’, on the 27th of June. Before then, how about downloading and listening to a remix of the song, done by the Joy Formidable, all for just your email address? Go on, you know you want to.
By Mary Chang on Wednesday, 2nd February 2011 at 12:00 pm
The last 2 years have been pretty excellent ones for London-based Boxer Rebellion: in 2009, their second album, ‘Union’, hit #1 on the iTunes UK albums chart and was named Best Alternative Album by iTunes; in 2010, their song ‘Spitting Fire’ appeared in the feature film Going the Distance and the band starred briefly in the film as well. Next week, they release into the wild their third album, ‘The Cold Still’. The album was produced and mixed by Ethan Johns, who has famously worked with the likes of Kings of Leon and Ryan Adams and more recently, on last year’s Tom Jones (‘Praise and Blame’) and Laura Marling (‘I Speak Because I Can’).
It’s no surprise that ‘Step Out of the Car’ (video here) was released as a single, with its melody brightly chugging along, being the most immediate song of all on this album. The problem is, it’s a false advertisement for the rest of the album – people expecting the rest of the album to sound much like that will be disappointed. Opening track ‘No Harm’ is softer and more introspective than ‘Step Out of the Car’, the song that immediately follows it. Maybe rearrangement of the tracks would have helped. Gorgeous instrumentation – particularly evocative tickling of the ivories – frames ‘Cause by the Light’, an atmospheric, nearly 5-minute opus. As expected by the title, ‘Organ Song’ features organ chords, but it sounds like you’re outdoors and breathing in the fresh air, like the scene in Forrest Gump when everyone’s running down a desolate Western highway as Jackson Browne’s ‘Running on Empty’ is playing in the background.
‘Memo’ has a darker rock vibe, which is a good thing. But where is the memorable hook? ‘The Runner’ is upbeat but disappointingly, it’s no ‘Evacuate’. ‘Locked in the Basement’ and ‘Cause for Alarm’ drift like smoke through up and through the air: some people like this kind of vibe, but it doesn’t ring my bells. This album is inevitably going to be compared to the monster ‘Union’ was, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing.
7/10
‘The Cold Still’ will be released next Monday, 7 February, on the band’s own label, Absentee Recordings.
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The last 2 years have been pretty excellent ones for London-based 
