Kele – The Boxer

“Please hang up and try again”. So says the familiar telephone operator sampled on not one but two of the tracks on Kele Okereke’s long-promised solo debut. If that line sums up Okereke’s aims here, the title he has chosen – The Boxer - can be seen as reflective of the methods used to try to achieve them, underlining the depth of his separation from Bloc Party. No longer playing a team sport, on these songs our man rechristens himself more bluntly as “Kele” and strikes out more or less alone, using his greater star power and songwriting abilities to avoid fastening himself to a collaborator, as bandmate Russell Lissack has been forced to do with his mediocre project Pin Me Down. Indeed, The Boxer rings out as a statement of very individual self-affirmation, its lyrics often documenting efforts to emerge stronger from personal turmoil. It is also defiantly not a Bloc Party record.

This album’s lead single, ‘Tenderoni’ jabbed very much in an electronic direction, an unsuprising move by Kele given the increasingly synthetic direction taken over Bloc Party’s career, culminating in the lacklustre third full-length effort Intimacy and its stunningly misguided remix companion record. Arguably Bloc Party’s faithful are a key audience which The Boxer must win over, and among that audience will be many looking for an electronic approach which can avoid the sacrificing of song which to varying degrees, plagued those most recent Bloc Party releases. Thankfully, this combining of Kele’s newfound electro-dance aspirations with decent songwriting is an objective that has generally been achieved, resulting in an album which is solid and listenable, if unspectacular.

The Boxer takes the form of a crisp modern dance record, aiming at a broad pop appeal. The supremacy of synths and immaculate beats here is not surprising, but they are admirably varied and applied to songs which are softly introspective as often as they are laden with the appropriately boxerlike bravado of ‘Tenderoni’ or the buzzsawing opener ‘Walk Tall’. The best contrast with the single is perhaps the subdued ‘New Rules’, a duet with Jodie Scantlebury which proves that quiet contemplation, carelessly given over to Armand Van Helden for the death-by-remix treatment with ‘Signs’ last year, is again sacred to Kele here.

Although the lyrics shift between triumph and angst, sometimes in the same song, the music quickly settles into a rhythm here. What Kele has done is to put together a thoroughly competent modern pop record, pushing what he has learned about hooks and his particular vocal talents further into electro/dance territory. He has, after all, grown “tired of indie music”, according to one perplexing recent pronouncement. Whilst it is not inventive or ambitious enough to set the whole world alight, The Boxer is unlikely to make indie music bored of Kele. This is not a momentous debut, but could well act as a springboard for a more challenging and accomplished solo effort.