Lightspeed Champion – Marlene (Domino)
3/5
By: Samuel Smith
Dev Hynes, ‘the voice, ears, fingers, flesh and blood’ behind Lightspeed Champion has re-emerged like a mouse from the musical woodwork with his first pro-pah release since 2008’s Falling Off The Lavender Bridge. The first record was conceived, born and raised in the wise and worldly arms of Bright Eyes’ long time producer Mike Mogis, along with a team of Saddle Creek musicians including The Faint’s drummer and Emmy the Great on guest vocals. Unfortunately, the Saddle Creek connection had the poor grace to occasionally shove Haynes’ off kilter pop songs from off the step of ingenuity and henceforth into the ungainly depths of Americana, there it dwelt, amidst a dirge of lap steels, slide guitars and hoe down string arrangements.
Thankfully his most recent trip into the studio still retains the kitsch self-awareness of the first record but has shrugged out of the cumbersome country jacket that weighed down his debut L.P. Climbing into some looser, more British duds and chaperoned by a certain Mr Ben Allen – the man who produced the best record of 2009, Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. Perhaps in part to this, or mayhaps because Hynes has been off on an extensive musical Odyssey (the single is supported by, amongst other things, a version of Serge Gainsbourg’s 69 Année érotique, recorded entirely by Hynes himself), ‘Marlene’ is a joyful smirk of an affair, it begins with a jerk-out of a guitar line; a bit pop, but a bit more Post Punk – Talking Heads at their most beat-y. This is held together with the most grandiose of choruses, all pleading strings expansively arranged over crashing drums and a plaintive vocal line that is, quite surprisingly, a little reminiscent of Rufus Wainwright.
Whereas before the songwriting was quite heavily centred around Hynes’ gratifyingly ambiguous lyric writing there has been a shift towards writing whole songs, like, with a band and everything. Furthermore, Hynes even seems more settled in his own vocals, finally dropping the corners of an American accent that threatened to ruin his debut material (the poor fellow was born in Texas but raised in Essex), emerging with a tonally strong and singularly idiosyncratic vocal character. Oh, and there’s a crotch grinding guitar solo that wouldn’t be out of place on Prince’s Controversy album (yes, it is that sexy).
However, catchy and endearing as it is, it still feels like one of those tracks that will quite quickly slip off your playlist, hopefully it will hold more of its own weight within the context of the album. Nonetheless, this is joyful, fun and, as ever with Lightspeed, delightfully esoteric while still clinging to its pop credentials.
Artists in this article: Lightspeed Champion
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