Playlouder - Music is the Network

It’s not difficult to see why Dev Hynes left Test Icicles. For a start they were shit. But more gallingly for Dev, they were trendy Hoxton shit, and probably not the sort of band a sensitive boy and a serious musician wants to be associated with and ultimately stuck with. No doubt there were creative differences that caused this great indie schism, and that was only made too apparent when RATTATAG skulked off to make guileless, imbecilic noise, while Dev soared away with all the tunes.

When I first saw Lightspeed Champion I have to say I was totally surprised by the change of direction. It was so straight, and yet so daring at the same time. The band were about to perform for one of those Channel 4 alchy drinks company love-ins where they get two and half minutes before the ads come and bonk you on the head with a massive dildo. And so Lightspeed Champion decided to open with ten-minute opus ‘Midnight Surprise’. Bravo!

Only as surprises go, the album is sadly a little short of them. That’s not to say it is a bad record because it isn’t, though it does often come short of its lofty ambition. Ten minutes for a song isn’t anarchic, it’s called prog, and you’ll have to do more than sound a bit like Patrick Wolf and then chuck some country guitars in the middle to sustain ones interest. Why Space Oddity was only about half the length, and many times more effective.

There are lots of moments on ‘Falling Off The Lavender Bridge’ that sound like Mr. Wolf, and some that sound like Ed Harcourt too. There are also moments that nod inevitably to Mr. Morrissey, though lyrically they often miss the playfulness that Steven brings to verse. “This is all going / all to shit / what can I do / It’s me and you… ruined”. It just doesn’t really say anything new, though it’s Shakespeare and Dickens and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Yeats all rolled into one compared to chart-topping cunt-bananas Scouting For Girls; for they are the worst band God ever blew a fart into. I digress…

The self-pitying elements sway precariously from self-mockery to mawkish teen-angst, and it doesn’t take a genius to point out the liberal sprinkling of the word bitch in two of the titles and throughout the lyrics indicates an underlying misogyny. But now I’m just nitpicking.

I’m being too harsh for sure. These are the bad things about the record. There are many, many good things about the record. It’s fresh, it’s pretty and it’s different and if you want a balanced review go read NME or something. It’s not quite Lightspeed yet; but this is the speed of sound.