It’s funky, with rollicking basslines so visceral and catchy you can do little to stop the inevitable head-bob they evoke. It’s elegant, with fugal arrangements best suited to the vaunted chambers of an ornate, Renaissance-era cathedral, somewhere in the English countryside. It’s brainy, housing within the well-constructed walls of its lyrics, without detriment to the cadence of the vocals, building wordy, inventive, rhyming schemes. It’s so many goddamn different things I couldn’t cover it all in one review, and it’s one hundred percent Lightspeed Champion.
But where do you start with a guy like Devonté Hynes. He’s done so much—from his tenure as a member of noisy dance-punks, Test Icicles, to writing lyrics for other music icons, including, but not limited to Florence + The Machine and The Chemical Brothers, to being an established and respected comic book artist—that sifting for useful information on the various Wikipedia pages and websites devoted to him was as fruitless as looking for that one ladder piece in your whole box of Legos. However, start I must, and here it goes. Hynes has hardly halted his hypersonic headway in the music world since his last studio album, Falling Off The Lavender Bridge, and with Life Is Sweet! Nice to Meet You he has not only, with justice flowing from every pore, beat back the weak whining of his naysayers, but also given us yet another example of the goofy, beautiful and volcanically energetic creativity from which his diverse musical ramblings spring forth.
One of the most striking things about the Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You, is the travels taken while listening. Many albums have a refreshing diversity to them, and play around quite dexterously with stylistic choices within their genre. Few of them however, uphold such consistent quality throughout; even fewer do it with as colorful a sonic palette, and perhaps most amazing of all, it is just what I expected from Lightspeed Champion. That is something precious few contemporary bands achieve, yet it is something Hynes does regularly; from I Wrote And Recorded This In Less Than Five Hours, to the EP Lightspeed Heat, nearly all his albums are made up of music that is exceedingly well written and delivered.
However, ignoring all previous achievements and simply reviewing Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You on its own, serves only to further highlight it’s many shining facets. Each song is a treasure, crafted perfectly and standing out singularly beautiful in memory. My personal favorite of the mix is “The Big Guns Of Highsmith,” a jaunty chamber pop tune reminiscent of some Beethoven piece or another. Beginning with an upbeat piano phrase in a major key, seemingly borrowed from the Baroque-era, and moving quickly into seemingly irreverent, always charming vocals telling that “bookclub didn’t happen as we planned” and robust choruses of “I’ll just stop complaining” in response to Hynes lament that “it hurts to be the one who’s always feeling sad.” With fugal, layered vocal tracks, the gentle rise and fall of accordion, and cautiously elegant guitar, the song continues forward at an unhurried, pleasant pace. Hynes ends the song after a long series of choruses by slow slipping into humming the melody, and then silence. Then there are songs like early single, “Marlene,” with a bumpin’ bassline and percussion designed to get you out of your seat, at first hearkening back to his days with Test Icicles, and the dance music he once devoted himself to, before breaking down into concert violins and instructions to “give up all your love.”
To put it simply, although I always expect great things from Devonté Hynes, I was bowled over by Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You. I truly urge you to go out and not only get the album, but please to do so legally. Even I am guilty of the occasional trip to a torrent site when low of cash, but after listening to this album, I would do anything to assure that Devonté Hynes continues to make music such as this, and if my paltry ten dollars can in some way attend to that, then by god, Mr. Hynes has got ten more greenbacks headed his way. This album is something great, it’s something unbelievable, it’s something I loved, and it’s something you will too.
Track List:
1. Dead Head Blues
2. Marlene
3. There’s Nothing Underwater
4. Intermission
5. Faculty of Fears
6. The Big Guns of Highsmith
7. Romart
8. I Don't Want to Wake Up Alone
9. Madame Van Damme
10. Smooth Day (At the Library)
11. Intermission 2
12. Sweetheart
13. Etude Op.3 "Goodnight Michalek"
14. Middle of the Dark
15. A Bridge and a Goodbye
