Boxer Rebellion

Playlouder.Com winners

London’s Boxer Rebellion are taking their responsibilities with a little more chili sauce compared to Mr Mojo the previous band on the New stage. The Playlouder.Com competition winners come on like Radiohead in full flight without all that clichéd element that turns it into a ‘more intelligent than thou’ cockfight.

Looking as if they're still in their teens, this bunch can’t believe their luck. Led by a charming skinny runt in an Orange shirt, he plays keyboards with that sixties Moog-ish sound that made psychedelia stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Taking melodies firmly by the danglies, they squeeze them until they implode and don’t strain themselves to do it. This isn’t fluke or whim; Boxer Rebellion pack a very controlled and cool punch.

Turning on the dynamics, they spit raw punk back into the mix, with strangled venom and bile. “If you want me, come and get me!” the singer yells with anguish into the mic, his elbow seemingly popping out of its socket as he bends forwards to shriek, like some brunette Kurt Cobain.

He’s got ‘it’ in his voice. You know ‘it’ when you hear it, don’t you? That particular pained, cracked, raw, phlegmy timbre to a tortured and emotive soul. Kurt had it, Liam has it (though Noel doesn’t and nor does Michael Stipe). Lennon had it, McCartney didn’t, Jack White and Thom Yorke have it... and so does Mr Orange T-shirt.

It makes him hypnotic both to watch and to listen to and is an automatically perfect focus for a band that will only get better with time. There’s even something Doves-esque going on. Particular on In Pursuit, their attitude becomes significantly more serious and perhaps the enormity of what they’re doing has just come into their perspective.

You and I is almost the erection-section but not in the slightest bit geared towards power-balladry. Such a simple repetitive refrain, but taken into directions that seem to shift and wash into an expressive creative undercurrent. People are ‘getting’ this and nobody seems more surprised than the band.

Boxer Rebellion create an original enough sound for them to envelop whichever method of conveying their ideas that they choose. Impossible to categorize in anything other than bedsit indie, they’re like British Sea Power in that they show obvious influence from respected directions but they don’t allow them to penetrate what they’re trying to achieve. They just make being laid-back exciting and that’s just fecking marvelous m’dears.

Stars are again born on the ‘New’ stage. With apologies to Rob, It’s a tradition, or an old charter. Or something.

Paul Mills

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