My Review: The Boxer Rebellion - Ghost Alive

 My Review 

The Boxer Rebellion - Ghost Alive

Time travellers.

Visitors to places.

Residences that change like thoughts.

Once upon a time there was an American, an Australian and two Englishmen who became souls on the move, as if they were living the disease of nomadic beauty. 

After four years in which their amalgam became solid, these boys released their first album: after that beginning, their flight continued under the banner of constant sonic migrations, with no clichés or genres to declare themselves faithful to. Always travelling, mentally and physically.

In 2018, the sixth album arrives and everything becomes clear: grief can create an emotional and acoustic beauty, like a breath that breaks tragedies but does not forget them, giving the awareness that we must work on memory.

And so the death of the leader Nathan Nicholson's father has given rise to the need for a conspicuous intimacy that was poured out with fine feathers in songs that also contemplate the sweetness and subtle intelligence of a soul that has decided not to sink into grief.

An album which contains the need to take folk music and augment it with sonic fascinations to enhance its visionary aspect and at the same time its intimacy, because pain can also be whispered, delicately showing its ramifications.

So the eleven songs are not shots of that pain but the presentation of skills that have revolutionised it, breaking it up before and giving it light in the chest later.

If the voice, as always, is a flock flying in the company of rainbows, the instruments have tuned themselves to make intimacy sound and to do so they have given themselves the ability to breathe the wind between guitars, bass, drums and strings.

One finds oneself with shivers constantly on the skin: like a drunken orchestra that forgets its own habit and approach to the construction of music, the painters of sound decide to travel inside intimacy, dilating spaces of artistic expression, to give everything the dress of light that caresses the darkness, seducing it with compositions that often refer to classical music.

But it is not a concept album: that would be reductive. Starting from a difficulty, they took the opportunity to create an impulse with the light bulb of tenderness turned on, to take away the sense of suffocation that could have done damage.

The result shows that smiles take root over cracks, flying from song to song with that contagious force that gives the listener dreams and depth.

You fantasise with arpeggiated energy (River), indie rock shows its face with delicacy and rhythm (Don't Look Back) and you lose yourself in tenderness (Fear).

Like peaceful nomads you walk with your suitcase with a sure trajectory inside the guitar that reminds you of Nick Drake and Tom McRae (Rain), then continuing on the keys of a minimalist but thunderous piano (Under Control), until the almost psychedelic need to climb into the sky (Don't Ever Stop), finally returning to planet Earth with the tender power of a track that seems to remind us of the splendour of the new acoustic movement of the early 2000s (Lost Cause).

And you can be infinitely sweet even if you have failure in your mind (What The Fuck), and then move on to sit with wounded hands in folk stuffed with clouds (Here I am) and later to walk through the atmospheres of a sea ready to surrender but capable of redemption (Love Yourself), and eventually to go and throw your bones into the bed with a dialogue where bitterness emerges with doubts and questions (Goodnight) and to try to sleep, even if only for exhaustion.

The album has the ability to enhance the acoustic atmospheres: the sense of measure gives it the spectacular ability to be a light avalanche that overwhelms us but with elegance, taking the beats off the threshold. 

This brings us back to the sixties, when the lyrics seemed to get the better of the music, but, if you listen carefully, you will notice how much artisan work has been done to enhance every single note as well as every single word.

Simply monumental!

Alex Dematteis 

Musicshockworld 

Salford

March 17th, 2022

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/ghost-alive/1567013227

https://open.spotify.com/album/5qhDOlEZCyFaNluxgfJsV2?si=QHdP_ZNwS7-aPVI2Bygz0A