New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ BOXER Official Website) Richmond VA band BOXER (caps intentional) has released their first official extended-play record, "Undertow." The album features five tracks making up approximately 13 minutes worth of listening time. Each of the members perform with verve and measured aggression on this latter-day hardcore record. The engineering is expert and does not fall victim to over-production, a rarity in this era of the digital studio. This is exceptionally fortunate for fans of hardcore music, too, because "
Undertow" features some of the most legitimate hardcore since Quicksand.
BOXER's sound lies somewhere between Lifetime and Hot Water Music. Their powerful guitars command brightly distorted, driving rhythms interspersed with heartfelt, clean-channel picking. Their vocalists pitch-scream over this wall of sound in raw, genuine tones indicative of the 1990s emotional hardcore tradition, true to the style that made bands like Sensefield, Sunny Day Real Estate, and the Promise Ring legends of the late hardcore scene.
Veteran listeners may feel distrustful of comparisons linking modern hardcore to bygone acts like Sunny Day, or even consider such suggestions blasphemous, but BOXER has everything the Revelation Records performers had in spades, without sounding derivative. Stewart
Jester and Grayson Wallace play guitar with torrential violence, their leads unadorned and spare. Between strums they provide vocals that compliment one another like glittering light on broken glass, one clear and melodic, the other grating and gravelly. Bassist Dewey Zei makes a harmonic walk of his basslines and marries seamlessly the roaring guitars to Ian Hurdle's percussion. Hurdle's drums go snap-smash and crack-crash in jazz-precision time with pounding, warlike intensity.
BOXER describe being in a punk/hardcore band from Richmond as a double-edged sword. "On one hand," they write, "you are following in the footsteps of legendary acts like Avail,
Strike Anywhere, and Government Warning, but on the other hand, you're constantly trying to stand out musically in a city brimming with spectacular artists." BOXER has nothing to fear from this, however. Among titans of the hardcore movement, they don't just fit in - they stand out, stand tall, and stride like giants.
The EP "
Undertow" is distributed globally by MondoTunes (www.MondoTunes.com) and is available at iTunes for convenient purchase and download
ARTIST CONTACT INFO:
[email protected]
https://www.reveillerecords.com
