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| Pastemagazine |
 Boxers are studies in contrast: brutish but graceful, quick but enduring. With his first solo album, Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke reveals similar juxtapositions, his feathery falsettos duking it out with the discordant electro beats. He makes a strong declaration of independence in the opener, “Walk Tall,” where he roars over a ferocious synth saw, “Cut your ties to the past and wave it goodbye.” The second track seeks to sever his indie-rock ties altogether, with his pitch manipulated into a high squeak and layered over old-school breaks. But while The Boxer is many things its namesake suggests—brash, fearless—it’s clumsy and confusing at times, too. The disparate elements tend to compete with each other, leading to the paranoid seizure of tracks like “All the Things I Could Never Say,” on which Okereke assumes the role of a preacher, with results too bizarre to be revelatory. Still, his earnestness shines through, and in shaking off his rock baggage, he’s made the best kind of electro album: the sort that can be appreciated just as much from the couch as the club....full text |
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| Bbc |
When, late last autumn, UK indie rock imperators Bloc Party decided to take a sabbatical, the prospect of making new music was the last thing on leader Kele Okereke’s mind. Instead, he bought himself his first apartment and signed up for kick-boxing lessons – like you do. Clearly, straight knee thrusts and wallpaper swatch books had only a transient appeal as he was soon ensconced in an EMI studio, plugging in unfamiliar synths and programming drum machines for the first time in his life.
Ratcheting up proceedings by collaborating with Alex Epton, aka Brooklyn remix maestro/Spank Rock producer XXXchange, Okereke’s debut proffers 10 robust tracks that owe more to the dancefloor than the indie rock stage (a trend already discernable on Bloc Party’s 2008 album Intimacy, to be fair). Doffing a hat to the likes of Gary Numan, TV On the Radio, M.I.A. and Bodyrox along the way, this is, for the most part, an album of leftfield electro/techno pop with a yearning, ruminative, songwriterly soul. Okereke’s lyrics dwell nakedly on matters emotional and existential and any song that can render an anthemic chorus from the phrase: “You’re making me older / You’re making me ill” – as All the Things I Could Never Say does – is clearly not to be confused with mirror ball escapism, even if elsewhere (On the Lam, Tenderoni) things err unashamedly toward happy hardcore....full text |
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| Guardian |
| Kele Okereke's first solo album begins with a blaring, fuzzy off-beat and the Bloc Party singer starting a military calling cadence: "I don't what you been told/ But this don't stand/ Walk tall, walk tall." We're certainly not in the Kansas of Silent Alarm any more. But then, often at Okereke's behest, Bloc Party had evolved into a quasi-electronic act even before the release of 2008's Intimacy – so the shift to a solo album that takes in sounds more usually found between stations on London's FM radios than on XFM isn't much of a surprise. In fact it's not even that much of a departure: the running guitar lines of Unholy Thoughts are close to something Russell Lissack might conjure up, and Yesterday's Gone is a Kele ballad from the same postcode as So Here We Are. It not quite the leap that tracks such as the sample-heavy, voice-changing twostep of On the Lam would suggest. It's a convergence that really works though, with Kele mixing the adventurous side electronic music enables him to embrace with the conservatism borne of years in a guitar band. A really solid debut....full text |
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