Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You
by Lightspeed Champion
  • Record Label: Domino
  • Release Date: Feb 16, 2010
Metascore
72

Generally favorable reviews - based on 23 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 17 out of 23
  2. Mixed: 6 out of 23
  3. Negative: 0 out of 23
  1. Alternative Press
    60
    Lightspeed Champion somehow fail to generate the true emotional sentiment that was the crux of the artists he's drawing from...Hynes has matured, though. [Mar 2010, p.94]
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  2. NOW Magazine
    60
    Judging by Devonté Hynes’s ambitiously grand follow-up to Falling Off The Lavender Bridge, with its piano intermissions, ubiquitous orchestra and choral chants, there’s been some Freddy Mercury blaring through his player.
  3. Tiny Mix Tapes
    60
    Life is Sweet! depicts a gifted artist taking a very solid step on the road to self-discovery. He's just wrestling with the palpable anxiety of influence at the moment.
  5. Q Magazine
    60
    He attampts to reinvent himself again, this time as an unlikely hybrid of Rufan Wainwright and Elvis Costello. The results are surprisingly good. [Mar 2010, p.105]
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  6. Paste Magazine
    48
    But the overproduction and studio gimmickry haunts the halls of this collegiate rock, constraining Hynes’ squeaky-clean instrumentation between alternating tedium and banality.
  7. Mojo
    40
    Despite being probably the best illustration of the scope of his creative impulses, ultimately Life Is... capsizes under the weight of its own cleverness. [Feb 2010, p. 104]
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User Reviews

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User Score
6.8

Generally favorable reviews- based on 5 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4 out of 5
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 5
  3. Negative: 1 out of 5
  1. popolopolous
    Mar 30, 2011
    3
    I came into Life Is Sweet! expecting a lot. I'd seen the video for Marlene: the song was catchy. Lightspeed Champion's previous album to thisI came into Life Is Sweet! expecting a lot. I'd seen the video for Marlene: the song was catchy. Lightspeed Champion's previous album to this day remains one of my favourite albums. But I was sorely disappointed.

    Life is Sweet! lacks the thing that made Lavender Bridge great: identity. Lavender Bridge was unique. While it had obvious influences, they all combined to form a greater whole, and a being that transcended influences to become a beast of its own. This album throws that identity out, in favour of variety as it swings between western to pop-rock to piano-led ballads to small classical-inspired instrumentals, and through this mechnical genre-running removes the raw emotion and humanity that Lavender had in spades.

    But, taken on its own merits, is Life Is Sweet! still a good album? The answer is possibly. While none of the songs are 'bad' per se, instrumentation is occasionally incongruous with the song it's in, repetition is featured highly but of the annoying parts of the songs, and as a complete album it is far too unfocused and dithering. Sweetheart is the best representation of the album as a whole: the song begins with an acoustic guitar, breaking tension with a bass guitar and swelling vocals in the chorus and showing fantastic amounts of potential - then it breaks its mood, momentum and quality as it breaks into a western, nearly hoe-down sounding refrain with Dev whining an annoying melody. Life Is Sweet! definitely had potential, but is overall disappointing - both standing alone, and as the follow-up to Lavender Bridge.    … Full Review »
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