Lightspeed Champion - Life is Sweet! Nice to Meet You (2010)

Lightspeed Champion spends too much time trying to borrow from his predecessors and influences when he is probably capable of writing perfectly good pop songs in his own style. Falling Off the Lavender Bridge (2008) was a fine, though not remarkable album and I expected him to follow it with a similar album because… why not, right? He must have gotten very bored over the last two years, because this new album is something else entirely. The songs that I most enjoy from this album are the ones that are unabashedly poppy, the ones that latch onto something really fun (like the funky melody of “Marlene”) and don’t try to be anything more or less than the sum of their parts. These songs are in the minority. On most of this album he appears to be going for a more abstract type of songwriting. A lot of songs go for the fuzzy lo-fi-ish indie pop of bands like Guided by Voices or Pavement—groups that made it okay for pop music to not be all that poppy in the traditional sense. That’s all fine and good, but it comes across as derivative when Lightspeed Champion does it, and it’s made even worse by the fact that the less ingenuous songs here are the better ones. If he’d not been trying so hard, he might have written a better album. Some examples… “I Don’t Want to Wake Up Alone” sounds like a crappy high-school power trio covering GBV (or The Ramones with your discman headphones on the fritz, take your pick), and it just as compelling as it sounds. “Smooth Day (At the Library)” sounds like a sleepy soul song until it devolves inexplicably into aimless guitar noodling. “Dead Head Blues” is a cutesy duet sung over very underproduced ukulele strumming, but I don’t usually judge first tracks too harshly as I typically expect them to be intros of some sort to wean us slowly onto the meat and potatoes of the album. “There’s Nothing Underwater” is eerie synths and echoes with barely audible vocals (was it recorded underwater?) It comes across as pretentious rather than artistic. I mean, good for you LC, you’re “unconventional.” That means nothing unless you have the music to back it up. You can be a pioneer, an experimenter if you will, but to be successful, it has to translate into good music and it doesn’t on this album. Then there are the intermissions. They add nothing to the album basically because they sound pretty much exactly like the aimless offbeat jams that surround them. Interludes on albums are meant to somehow break up the continuity of an album by interjecting something different from the bulk of the record. These intermissions really aren’t intermissions, and I’m not a big fan of intermissions anyway. If an album is good enough, it doesn’t need to have an aimless divider (cough cough Band of Horses) of whatever ambient noise or instrumental motif the artists feel compelled to include but couldn’t write into an actual song. If he turned in an entire album of poppy songs like “Marlene,” “Romart,” and “Madame Van Damme” this would be among the best albums of the year so far. Instead it tries to be something fresh and intrepid and falls flat on its face.

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