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Track List
01) Fake Empire
02) Mistaken for Strangers
03) Brainy
04) Squalor Victoria
05) Green Gloves
06) Slow Show
07) Apartment Story
08) Start a War
09) Guest Room
10) Racing Like a Pro
11) Ada
12) Gospel
01) Fake Empire
02) Mistaken for Strangers
03) Brainy
04) Squalor Victoria
05) Green Gloves
06) Slow Show
07) Apartment Story
08) Start a War
09) Guest Room
10) Racing Like a Pro
11) Ada
12) Gospel
3:25
3:30
3:18
2:59
3:39
4:08
3:32
3:16
3:18
3:24
4:03
4:29
Data Complete
80%
Total Rating
80%Total Rating
(3 users)
Back Cover
CD Art
3D Case
3D Thumb
3D Flat
3D Face
3D Spine
First Released
2007
Alternative Rock
Intense
Rock/Pop
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Album
300,000 copies
Album Description
Available in:
Boxer is the fourth studio album by Brooklyn-based indie rock band The National. It was released on May 22, 2007 by Beggars Banquet Records, and has since sold over 300,000 copies worldwide. The album features a guest performance by Sufjan Stevens on "Ada" and "Racing Like a Pro" and backing vocals by Marla Hansen. Following its release, the album debuted at #68 on the U.S. Billboard 200, selling about 9,500 copies in its first week. The song "Slow Show" contains lyrics from the band's song "29 Years," first found on their self-titled debut album. A film by Vincent Moon documenting the creation of the album, titled A Skin, a Night, was released along with a collection of B-sides and rarities titled The Virginia EP on May 20, 2008.
The album cover is a photo of the band performing "The Geese of Beverly Road" (from the band's third album Alligator) at producer Peter Katis' wedding.
The album has had pop-cultural reach, with lyrics from "Racing Like A Pro" having been excerpted in the novel Imperial Bedrooms by American author Bret Easton Ellis.
User Album Review
Matt Berninger, vocalist for Brooklyn’s The National, has a remarkable baritone - rich, syrupy, and heavy with a melancholy and regret that precious few of his peers can muster. It’s the sort of voice that doesn’t make for Top 40 records, necessarily. But as with The National’s peers - bands like American Music Club and the Tindersticks, or going back a little further, Godfather Of Gloom Leonard Cohen - there's much evidence here on Boxer, that the glass-half-empty take on life can produce some pretty special music.
It’s not all about Berninger, though. Four albums have seen The National mature into a band with a grasp of impressive scope and subtle dynamics. See how the opening “Fake Empire” masters the art of the gentle build, starting as a gentle, minimalist-tinged piano elegy and building into a stomping one-chord bass jam embellished with swooping horns. Also the magic “Mistaken For Strangers”, a standout cut that takes the shimmering guitars and circular drums of U2 and reworks their optimistic bombast into a boozy, lonely lament to the ‘unmagnificent lives of adults’. ‘You wouldn’t want an angel watching over you’, sings Berninger, in the song’s most affecting ine, ‘Surprise, surprise - they wouldn’t want to watch’.
If there’s a fault to Boxer, it’s that beyond its remarkable opening salvo, The National feel noticeably lighter on the anthems than they did on 2005’s rightly hailed Alligator. On songs like “Squalor Victoria” and “Guest Room”, the band seem more content to drift along on Bryan Devendorf’s galloping, cyclical drumming, exploring textures rather than building to peaks. It’s an approach that has charms of its own - see “Green Gloves”, a sleep-dazed ramble that reconciles rustic alt-country charm with the ethereal textures of shoegaze rock. In the long run, though, it leaves Boxer feeling a somewhat slighter piece of work than its predecessor, if still a pretty fine album in its own right.
External Album Reviews
None...
User Comments
Available in:
Boxer is the fourth studio album by Brooklyn-based indie rock band The National. It was released on May 22, 2007 by Beggars Banquet Records, and has since sold over 300,000 copies worldwide. The album features a guest performance by Sufjan Stevens on "Ada" and "Racing Like a Pro" and backing vocals by Marla Hansen. Following its release, the album debuted at #68 on the U.S. Billboard 200, selling about 9,500 copies in its first week. The song "Slow Show" contains lyrics from the band's song "29 Years," first found on their self-titled debut album. A film by Vincent Moon documenting the creation of the album, titled A Skin, a Night, was released along with a collection of B-sides and rarities titled The Virginia EP on May 20, 2008.
The album cover is a photo of the band performing "The Geese of Beverly Road" (from the band's third album Alligator) at producer Peter Katis' wedding.
The album has had pop-cultural reach, with lyrics from "Racing Like A Pro" having been excerpted in the novel Imperial Bedrooms by American author Bret Easton Ellis.
User Album Review
Matt Berninger, vocalist for Brooklyn’s The National, has a remarkable baritone - rich, syrupy, and heavy with a melancholy and regret that precious few of his peers can muster. It’s the sort of voice that doesn’t make for Top 40 records, necessarily. But as with The National’s peers - bands like American Music Club and the Tindersticks, or going back a little further, Godfather Of Gloom Leonard Cohen - there's much evidence here on Boxer, that the glass-half-empty take on life can produce some pretty special music.
It’s not all about Berninger, though. Four albums have seen The National mature into a band with a grasp of impressive scope and subtle dynamics. See how the opening “Fake Empire” masters the art of the gentle build, starting as a gentle, minimalist-tinged piano elegy and building into a stomping one-chord bass jam embellished with swooping horns. Also the magic “Mistaken For Strangers”, a standout cut that takes the shimmering guitars and circular drums of U2 and reworks their optimistic bombast into a boozy, lonely lament to the ‘unmagnificent lives of adults’. ‘You wouldn’t want an angel watching over you’, sings Berninger, in the song’s most affecting ine, ‘Surprise, surprise - they wouldn’t want to watch’.
If there’s a fault to Boxer, it’s that beyond its remarkable opening salvo, The National feel noticeably lighter on the anthems than they did on 2005’s rightly hailed Alligator. On songs like “Squalor Victoria” and “Guest Room”, the band seem more content to drift along on Bryan Devendorf’s galloping, cyclical drumming, exploring textures rather than building to peaks. It’s an approach that has charms of its own - see “Green Gloves”, a sleep-dazed ramble that reconciles rustic alt-country charm with the ethereal textures of shoegaze rock. In the long run, though, it leaves Boxer feeling a somewhat slighter piece of work than its predecessor, if still a pretty fine album in its own right.
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