Lightspeed Champion (Live)

You may have noticed that i've been a little lax lately, this is partly due to me not having purchased much music worth writing about and partly because i've been to quite a lot of gigs recently. As this blog is about exciting things happening in music and Brighton i will start to write about these. This is the first and i was asked to review it by Brighton Calling.



What threatened to be a sweltering summer gig in the sweat-box that is the Concorde 2 proved to be a surprising evening all round. For those who haven't seen Lightspeed Champion live before, the line-up itself may well have been startling enough; a pretty female drummer, a bearded Marcus Brigstocke on bass, a violinist who could head-bang whilst playing and Devonte Hynes, a skinny, hairy, bespectacled young man clad in a Neil Diamond T-shirt and a furry hat that would make Jay Kay jealous (or very hot).

For those that haven't heard Lightspeed Champion before, the surprise came from their ability to effortlessly straddle different genres, switching seamlessly between folk, indie, rock and metal. The opening song, a ballad, followed by a full-on stadium rock guitar widdling freak-out (complete with one foot mounted on the monitor, smoke and bright back-lights obscuring everything but Dev's odd silhouette) that segued almost unnoticeably into a poppier number set the tone for the night. Lightspeed Champion weren't about to let their crowd get bored or even comfortable, just as the onlooker is settling into a sombre violin backed track about love and loss the band switch up a gear, the drums double in volume and intensity and Dev launches into another frenetic guitar onslaught whilst throwing himself around the stage. The change is at once exciting and refreshing but doesn't last for long as the growl of distortion and feedback soon dissipates and is replaced by the violin again, returning to the calm that preceded the storm. Unpredictability is the name of the game and no sooner than the pattern of throwing in bursts of energetic fret and stage work appears it is broken by a truly beautiful acoustic song about an ex-lover that winds its way through the audience undisturbed like the cooling breeze thankfully rolling in off of the sea.

For those that have seen the band live there were also surprises, considering their debut album was only released earlier this year it was pleasant to hear three new tracks including 'Happy Birthday'. Clearly in its formative stages moving from acoustic guitar to piano solo to another high intensity chorus with drums that could have soundtracked the cup-of-water-on-the-dashboard scene from Jurassic Park, it sounded endearingly rough around the edges which provoked Dev to comment 'I'm not sure about that one yet'. 'Marlene' (another new one) was a much more polished affair incorporating some disco-esque slide violin perfectly demonstrating the subtleties of the band, the ability to play heavy, frantic riffs but underpin them with the melancholy folkiness of the violin creating a sound so much more than the sum of its parts. A couple of improvised jams kept the crowd entertained between the new songs and the album tracks, one about loving Brighton beach and the other a furious rock number both backed by the entire band and sounding like they could have been album tracks despite Dev stating that they were 'rubbish'. It's really refreshing to see a band with so much ability and understanding of each other that they can create something so listenable with barely a glance in each other's direction.

Unfortunately, the evening had to come to an end and was rounded out nicely by a version of the Imperial March into the Star Wars theme and an instrument swap for 'All To Shit'. An excellent set by an excellent band thoroughly deserving of the media hype that recently surrounded them and therefore even more surprising that the Concorde 2 was only half full.

Lightspeed Champion - Midnight Surprise