Lightspeed Champion - Falling Off The Lavender Bridge

This could all kick off with some big rant at anyone who didn’t think Test Icicles were completely brilliant, but what’s the point? It’s not as if your enjoyment of them is in anyway relevant to the enjoyment of former member Dev Hynes’s alias Lightspeed Champion. Some alternate universe has merged with ours and the result is Dev producing a previously inconceivable album of emotionally acute, orchestral country.

And just in case you were in any doubt this is actually happening, he helpfully opens the album with about as many country clichés as you can possibly fit into twenty-five seconds, before launching into debut single and real-life masterpiece, ‘Galaxy Of The Lost’, the lyrics of which would certainly impress any fallen alcoholic country legends with its air of non-discriminate loathing.

In fact, lyrically the album reels off like one long to-do list of pain, angst and despondency, but in such a refreshingly honest way it almost feels like, provided you collect personal issues like Panini stickers, it’s your life on record. Lines drip with a self-defeating optimism (‘Sometimes in the cold night, my phone rings, but it’s not you’), or an anxiety (‘Fuck, I think she just saw me’) that you’re not going to be hearing Klaxons admitting too any time soon.

The music fits perfectly of course, and the fantastic production lends an almost Hollywood score sheen on the plentiful string and wind arrangements. Something totally vital when the majority of the songs possess the kind of anthemic, fireworks endings that might make even the great Sufjan Stevens himself a little jealous. ‘I Could Have Done This Myself’, ‘Dry Lips’ and ten-minute gawp-demanding amaze-athon ‘Midnight Surprise’ are particularly glorious examples of this in work. The few times it doesn’t happen are of course the least initially impressive moments, but eventually they grow into a welcome respite from the drama, most notably the worryingly titled, yet impossibly pretty, ‘Let The Bitches Die’.

The album closes with ‘No Surprises’, which with its almost endlessly repeated rumination ‘the more I hear the more I hate’, half makes you want to reach through into the speaker and give him a big comforting hug, and half makes you wish someone did the same for you. A beautiful, fitting end.