Kele - The Boxer

Rating: 3/10
Genre: Dance/Alternative
Late last year saw Bloc Party take a temporary hiatus as their record contract was completed. After 3 solid studio albums and 2 remix albums the band have decided to take a break and go their seperate ways to try out new projects before reconvening some time in the future. "The Boxer" is one of the resulting projects of this hiatus and sees lead singer Kele Okereke tackle dance music head on. Bloc Party themselves had slowly been making the transition from straight up Indie Rock to Indie Dance hybrid with their last album "Intimacy" mixing synthesizers, samples and drum loops with their guitar driven rock sound. However "The Boxer" really takes this up a notch by almost discarding the rock edge completely.

"The Boxer" is ambitious and daring. Unlike many solo projects it is not just a rehashing of Kele's original band's work but an actual departure from that sound a step into the unknown. The only problem with this is that it hasn't exactly produced great results. The opener "Walk Tall" is a good example of this, the off kilter synthesizers surge against the tight robotic beats to produce dance music that has too many layers clashing at once to be coherent. The album jumps from one song to the next with no real flow with tracks like "On The Lam" attempting to capture a club classic drum and bass sound and falling short due to over sampling. The problem with the sampling is that often an annoying squeaky sound is picked and then recycled repeatedly throughout that track. This wouldn't be much of a problem unfortunately this is potentially the only consistent element running through the record. The only highlights really are the tracks that manage to escape the over cluttering like the simplistic electro of "Tenderoni" and the very Bloc Partyish track "Unholy Thoughts". Unfortunately most of the record falls short of expectations and whilst the album was an ambitious release it seems Kele may have over reached.

Overall i wouldn't recommend this album to anyone except die hard Bloc Party fans. The two or three tracks that are passable do not make up for the rest of the cluttered crap on show here. As far as dance music goes you would be better off sticking with artists who excel at what they do like Holy Fuck or Rival Consoles.

Download: "Tenderoni" "Unholy Thoughts"