So much for an awkward phase. When we met Kele Okereke in 2005, on Bloc Party’s debut album, Silent Alarm, he seemed to have skipped that itchy, pupal phase of most indie-rock frontmen, those years spent in someone else’s idea of cool: the hair too effortfully shaggy, the swoon slightly too melodramatic, 30% too much leather on the body. Just 23 and a university student in London, he was arch and stylish yet never detached; he could seem downright frantic, really, in how much he wanted the world to spin in tow with his own idealism. He was the ideal avatar for this band with a formidable rhythm section, intuitive post-rock guitars, and three other members also spoiled for photogenic angles. Even when Bloc Party’s original lineup strained in their experiments (slide guitar, Auto-Tune), and sounded exhausted in the half-life of their original ferocity (Four), they never failed to be fantastic live, when all the studio clutter melted away and there remained four men of pared-down resolve. That’s when the real magic of Bloc Party happened—when the lads who wrote “Octopus” remembered they only had two hands each.
In his first two solo albums, as the mononymous Kele, Okereke brought a different sort of focus. The Boxer and Trick slotted into Bloc Party’s persistent breakup rumors with their profound apathy for rock music, doling out spiky, uneven house and lo-fi electro primed with xylophones, upstart female dance vocalists (Jodie Scantlebury, Yasmin Shahmir), and Okereke’s durable pathos. Now, on his third record, this time under his full name, the erstwhile frontman treads the turf of most rockers’ first solo forays: the folksy, fingerpicked inner-soul audit. Fatherland is a significantly simplified effort, a work of gentle, singer-songwriter consideration largely haunted by lost loves rendered as exactingly as still lifes. It’s a retrospective of undoings with a cold eye turned inward; it feels cumulative when, in that marbled English accent, he murmurs, “Maybe this is payback for a youth on the run/For all the hearts I did break” (“You Keep on Whispering His Name”), guitar plucks spare and unforgiving beneath him.
In this conspicuous lateral step, in its avoidance of studio sheen and flurried moving parts, Fatherland can feel like a particularly long discourse, one still working out the threads worth repeating. Okereke is acutely aware of the clock, weary of what may not scan as appropriate in his advancing age (all of 35, but he’s a scene veteran, after all). He’s not as amiable at last call anymore: “From the palace of Versailles to the streets of Peckham Rye/You crave the dizziest of heights, but we’re caught out at the lights,” he chides a lover who, honestly, sounds a bit long-suffering themselves (elsewhere in this song, “Streets Been Talking,” Okereke takes a potshot at their tattoo). He spends the holidays apart from his mate, ignoring the sloppy festivities around him to worry that their love is already wobbling, flamenco guitar purring lightly beneath him (“The New Year Party”). Consistently, he seems more content with quiet scrutiny than outer flash; at one point, he sings in falsetto reverence to “Yemaya,” a maternal Santería water goddess, over a brooding, vaguely Celtic string arrangement. Somewhat inexplicably, there is also a ragtime piano ditty (“Capers”).
Okereke, one of indie rock’s few openly gay singers, has a facility with using the male pronouns of his partners in a way seldom heard in the genre. In “Grounds for Resentment,” his deceptively chipper, organ-tinged duet with Olly Alexander of Years & Years, both singers’ lissome jazz-pop trills underscore the rarity here: two men singing their heartbreak to each other, on a relatively mainstream album. Their interplay is charming, the sort of drolly performative two-step of people who know their reconciliation is inevitable: “I kept your T-shirt and your cap/All this evidence is surely looking bad,” admits Alexander softly. It’s Fatherland’s second-most tender track.
The first is “Savannah,” Okereke’s rootsy ode to his newborn daughter. That song, in its Jeff Buckley-esque guitar, dusty handclaps, and seraphic male harmonies, is a lovely moment of paternal wonder. “Oh Savannah you look like your mother/But I did not know her so well,” he serenades her, a beguiling line that stirs many possibilities as he urges her onward to be kind and “let love flow through your soul, always.” It’s the most helpless in awe Okereke has sounded since “This Modern Love,” Silent Alarm’s timeless tearjerker on the complexity of recognizing love and fearing it in tandem. He’s come miles since then, and shed a lot of that noise—and he sounds anything but lost now.
