Of all the groups who first got together on the campus of Wesleyan University in the early 00s, Francis Farewell Starlite’s pop project Francis and the Lights was the most unstuck from time. Starlite’s pop is poised and unhurried, without being particularly flashy; vocally, thinking of a more soulful Peter Gabriel won’t take you far from the mark. And though the quality of his small catalogue has certainly lived up to, if not surpassed, his more well-known classmates’ music, its understated tone and the rather mysterious nature of its frontman kept Francis relatively off the radar. Though it’s been some time since Francis and the Lights delivered the promising 2010 debut It’ll Be Better—an album stocked with pop gems like “Knees to the Floor” that would have slayed in a different era but were hard to tack to a contemporary style—it’s a release that holds up because of that same timelessness. Save for some production work on Drake’s Thank Me Later—the slow-burn “Karaoke”—and the occasional high-concept performance piece, it’s been a quiet couple of years for the Lights.
Though Francis’ new EP Like a Dream is a brief outing—four songs that clock in, collectively, a few ticks shy of 14 minutes—it serves as a satisfying end to the silence. Though nothing here approaches surefire radio smashes or really anything that’s going to hit you like a load of bricks, songs like collection-closer “ETC” and breezy opener “Like a Dream” hint at interesting new directions. The former feels like wading through a fog compared to Francis’ usual rather-direct approach, bouncing Starlite’s voice off itself to create one of the spacier, funkier atmospheres he's inhabited so far. Though something like “Like a Dream” is a breezy track whose complete lack of edge might rub you the wrong way—”This could be in a commercial!” a coworker brightly remarked—its gentle electric throb gets in your head.
The other songs on this collection, “If They Don’t Come Tomorrow” and “Betting on Us”, don’t exactly move the ball forward, but they aren’t necessarily worse off for their lack of inventiveness—they could easily be tacked onto the already-too-short It’ll Be Better and no one would blink. “Betting on Us” in particularly best channels that 80s-Gabriel-uplifting-pop thing that I can imagine most people will hear, which is to say that its bones are solid if not a touch generic. (You probably couldn’t blast it through a window, unfortunately.) “If They Don’t Come Tomorrow” is another example of Francis treating his vocals more than his audience might be used to, but outside of a few nice vocal runs and a hook or two, it’s relatively aimless.
Though it’s dangerous to think of these pocket-sized releases as “appetizers,” Like a Dream is something that certainly primes the listener for the main course. Though it’s all relative when it comes to Francis’ tight, deliberate sound, the EP gives a glimpse of what It’ll Be Better’s follow-up might entail. Also, to be sure, Like a Dream also succeeds in re-injecting Francis into the conversation when the timing is a little better—though many soldiers have entered the borderlands of R&B and singer-songwriter pop in recent years, it just might be that Francis is the most natural talent of all of them. (Just saying: He’s a memorable dancer). But though nice moments speckle Like a Dream, it plays like a pleasant dream you can't quite recall.
