(Domino/EMI)

Devonté Hynes’s latest paean to musical restlessness

You can’t help but feel a little sorry for Devonté Hynes. As the lead singer of briefly-lived but much-hyped British dance-punkers Test Icicles, he had his fifteen minutes of being the next big thing at the tender age of nineteen. After that band dissolved because they didn’t actually like the kind of music they made, Hynes went on to record under the name Lightspeed Champion, producing an alt-country album (Falling Off The Lavender Bridge) with none other than Mike Mogis, one of the Monsters Of Folk and the guy behind Conor Oberst’s sound. Since then, Hynes has taken to giving away a ridiculous quantity of music online and collaborating with as many other musicians as humanly possible. On Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You, Hynes doesn’t exactly dispel his cultivated unpredictable image. Gone are the quiet Omaha-folk stylings of Lavender Bridge, which are replaced by a more driving Brit-pop sound, albeit Brit-pop filtered through Andrew Lloyd Weber’s histrionics (The Big Guns Of Highsmith sounds like it was ripped from a B-grade musical). There’s certainly diverse instrumentation, with Etude Op. 3, ‘Goodnight Michalek’ being driven by classical piano and I Don’t Want To Wake Up Alone being ornamented with rococo string arrangements. But no matter how many gems are in this album – and there are a few – stylistically, it’s a dog’s breakfast. Hynes is still clearly searching for a sound to call his own – but his frenetic approach isn’t likely to get him there.

***½

CHAD PARKHILL

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