Lightspeed Champion - Marlene

’s over-eager vocals and out of the ordinary lyrics surge operatically over painfully minimal drums and soaring strings in epic, cinematic breakdown choruses, and playfully stomp over jaunty verses, telling tales of young romance and self-reference in this, the primary single from his ‘Life is Sweet! Nice to Meet You’ album.

Perhaps the song’s most notable feature is its juxtaposition, its contrast. The dichotomy of the verses and choruses, two entirely separate entities, serves purely to illustrate Lightspeed Champion’s status as pop composer. His interest lies not in preserving a genre, at least not beyond the somewhat expansive ‘pop’ tag, but rather in using instruments, styles, tempos as he wishes. Strings run the gamut. From playing the fiddle all alone at times, to commanding the utmost respect in orchestral packs at others, they are creatively employed by the crushingly stylish Hynes, a testament to his democratic approach to instrumentation.

The single’s constant is his voice. Always, always possessed with energy, it incessantly peppers the track with flourishes and vibrato. It oozes. It infects. It catches. Lyrically, there is a modern obscurity to the song. A very obvious rejection of traditional love songs, an explicit pursuit of ‘smart’, these lyrics are sure to pulse resonant frequencies through the hearts of English Lit students yet to be burnt out on pop intelligence.

It is a comfortable single; a creative stretch of the legs. ‘Marlene’ is a reassuring ‘yeah, I’ve still got it’ to his fans. It’s confident and clearly symbolic of an album built to satisfy. It cannot be that this track comes from a man unsure of his music, or of his capacity to produce it.