The Boxer Rebellion
Ry Cox
This event is 21 and over
$20.00 – General Admission
*plus applicable service fees
Tickets available at The Independent box office (628 Divisadero, SF) with no service charge.
Just sometimes, good things come to those who wait. In an era of overnight success, where last year’s Next Big Things are often forgotten a mere 12 months on, The Boxer Rebellion offer convincing proof that the only success worth having is the kind that is earned the hard way. The London-based quartet are about to release their new album, ‘Ocean by Ocean’, their fifth in a career now into its 15th year. Fifteen years is more than most bands manage; it’s more enduring than the average marriage. “We have spent a lot of time chasing dangling carrots,” is how singer Nathan Nicholson chooses to sum up what it feels like to have been on the brink of the big-time – critical darlings often within a finger’s reach of that life-changing hit single – for so long now.
That ‘Ocean by Ocean’ is an accomplished, beautifully orchestrated and impeccably freighted album should hardly come as a surprise – this is, after all, an act that knows precisely what it is doing, and how to do it – but there is a depth of emotion to every one of these 10 songs here that lift each towards the hymnal. And so surely, this time, it will indeed translate to the masses, for like other great cult acts before them – Elbow, The National – their time has come, their crossover imminent.
The Boxer Rebellion are a London quartet that never did quite conform. The singer is from Tennessee, for a start. Nathan Nicholson arrived in the capital on the cusp of a new century when he was barely out of his teens, and hungry for the kind of culture he felt was largely absent from America’s south. “I’d been a huge fan of British pop and rock, and Britpop in general,” he says, “and I came wanting to immerse myself in the scene as much as I could. ”He points out that he did try to do this at home first, but it didn’t go down too well. “I used to wear my Clarks Wallabees everywhere I went.” He laughs. “I guess I looked a bit of a douche bag.”