Lightspeed Champion Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You (Domino)
3/5
By: Matt Tomiak
Half a decade after leading the aberrant experimentation of fleetingly feted East Londoners Test Icicles, Dev "Lightspeed Champion" Hynes is back with a second solo LP.
Coming from a man who once made riotous, confrontational thrash-rock his stock-in-trade, the baroque indie of Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You can often feel almost disconcertingly earnest, despite Hynes' voice being pitched in a bizarre middle ground somewhere between the puny nasal whine of David Tattersall, frontman of none-more-indie bed-sit languishers The Wave Pictures, and Croydon soul man David McAlmont.
There's a campy showtune edge to much of the material her e, and Hynes can sometimes overdo things, such as when he's playing the jilted lover desperate for reconciliation on the overblown 'Dead Head Blues' . But the aggrieved Beirut-style waltz 'There's Nothing Underwater' succeeds through its lack of guile and 'The Big Guns of Highsmith', with a larky call-and-response chorus ('hurts to be the one who's always feeling sad/OH JUST STOP COMPLAINING!') shows he hasn't completely abandoned his old band's wry sensibilities.
Artists in this article: Lightspeed Champion
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