Devonté Hynes enjoyed critical acclaim at age 19 as a member of art-thrashers Test Icicles, and now, as Lightspeed Champion, he works with the resigned determination of someone who realizes hype is fleeting. Under a pair of pseudonyms (Blood Orange is the other), Hynes gives away impossible-to-digest amounts of free music online. Most recently, Hynes had his heart sawed to pieces by adorable animated bears in the Kanye West-endorsed (all caps: "THIS IS DOPE") video for Basement Jaxx's 2009 electro-pop stunner "My Turn", a song he co-wrote. As Hynes wonders aloud, "When will this all start?" it sounds like he knows it probably won't. If "My Turn" lays bare Hynes' fears, his Lightspeed project battles them-- eccentrically and at times too obscurely, but no less quixotically.
As Lightspeed, Hynes flees from the trends that briefly propelled his former band, while inevitably failing to escape them. His 2008 debut, Falling Under the Lavender Bridge, embraced the Americana twang of Saddle Creek in-house producer Mike Mogis, skewering ghetto-fetishizing peers with songs like "All My Friends Are Listening to Crunk". It was hard to tell who was being more ironic. Appropriately, then, Life Is Sweet! Nice to Meet You brings on a producer with a hip-hop background, Ben Allen, who also oversaw a little record called Merriweather Post Pavilion. For better and worse, Lightspeed's sophomore album plays like a product of Hynes' restlessness. Alternately inspired and frustrating, it addresses themes of lost love (and lost chicness) with Queen-size 70s-rock pomp, neoclassical interludes, and one ukulele-based chamber-pop song.
Hynes can shred, too, laying down a nasty guitar solo on the album's first single, "Marlene", a twitchy but slightly overlong funk barrage that could make "more triangle" the new "more cowbell." "Stop being cool," Hynes demands, a refrain that might be a mission statement for the whole Lightspeed project. The catchiest song, live favorite "Madame Van Damme", takes hipster self-loathing to its cheerful extreme, repeating, "Kill me, baby, won't ya kill me," over a light girl-group bounce. Heaven knows he's miserable now, but "Faculty of Fears" goes one Morrissey hiccup too far, tethering a badass bass groove to inscrutable lyrics about sarongs and Pythagorean theorems.
The best and the worst of Life Is Sweet! Nice to Meet You meet on "The Big Guns of Highsmith". First it's a clever kiss-off to London: "Chelsea teas and Socrates still haunt me/ A life I strived and chased and had and lost." Then it's clever self-recrimination: "Hurts be to be the one who's always feeling sad," Hynes whines, before a Greek chorus retorts, "Oh, just stop complaining!" This dry self-awareness puts the album's remaining highlights-- baroque keyboard plaint "Middle of the Dark", spaghetti-Western epic "Sweetheart", jazz-splashed rumination "Smooth Day (At the Library)"-- in proper context. It's also bloodlessly cerebral. We are not the champions, my friends. Hynes has been, and still could be again, but for now he's keeping that English stiff upper lip about it.
