NYLON - February 2008 - (Page 102) FAST TIMES Dev Hynes, a.k.a. Lightspeed Champion, may not be in Test Icicles anymore, but anyone who covers “Xanadu” has still got balls. By Kim Taylor Bennett. Photographed by Jonathan Feinstein Dev Hynes is a recognizable face around London town, partly because he cuts such a distinctive figure: His Costello-esque spectacles, pile of black hair that seems perpetually on the verge of sliding from his head, and thrift store threads are unmissable. He used to be one third of abrasive noise punksters Test Icicles, who split in 2006 at the height of their hype, later explaining that they just didn’t like their own music. Sam Mehran disappeared to the West Coast and Rory Atwell still plays under various guises, but it’s Hynes who has enacted a startling aboutface, with his new incarnation as Lightspeed Champion. If Test Icicles made you want to cover your ears, Lightspeed Champion will make you want to fall in love. Songs like “Tell Me What It’s Worth” and “Midnight Surprise” might be lyrically dark and introspective, but they’re also lush, softly strummed, and sweetly sung—part Sufjan, part Weezer with a slide guitar. Hynes wrote his debut album Falling Off The Lavender Bridge in London (following the release of his excellent Galaxy of the Lost EP, which featured a heart-breaking cover of the ELO/ Olivia Newton John hit “Xanadu”), but it’s steeped in Americana folk. To record it he decamped to Omaha, Nebraska, to work with Saddle Creek producer Mike Mogis and immerse himself in the city’s infamous Bright Eyes scene. Sitting on a Hoxton rooftop on a gray, drizzly afternoon, Hynes laughs in disbelief at the experience. “Clark from the the Faint did the drums on some songs, which was weird because I listened to Danse Macabre all the time when it came out,” he gushes. “And Tim Kasher from Cursive sings on one track. His voice was the soundtrack to a year of my life! It didn’t really hit me until I left Omaha, which is probably a good thing.” You can sometimes catch Hynes performing riotous acoustic covers of Blink-182 and Green Day, with Emmy the Great or flame-haired chanteuse Florence (of Florence and the Machine) backing him up (Faris Rotter of the Horrors and Jack Peñate have also made guest appearances at his shows). But his real weakness is for the pop charts. He laughingly admits that when he was 15 (he’s 21 now) he even bought an Enrique Iglesias album. “My music taste is really mainstream,” he says. “I bought all the N*Sync albums when they came out and I wasn’t that young! I bought Justified and Nellyville the day they were released and I remember thinking, ‘I’ve just bought two pun-titled albums!’ I’m just a big fan of classic pop songwriting.” It’s easy to warm to Hynes: He’s a comic book nerd (the name Lightspeed Champion comes from a superhero he created as a child, and he’s been known to perform in a Spiderman costume); a bundle of awkwardness who can’t quite play the self-promotion game expected of him. Occasionally even the very act of writing music strikes him as peculiar. “I find the idea of people listening to sounds I make so weird!” he says. He also spends an inordinate amount of time writing down his thoughts for the world to read on his blog. His favorite topic, though, is girls. “I had this theory the other day that pretty much everything I do in my life in some form goes back to girls and it really depressed me,” he says with a sigh. “I feel like God’s been testing me with girls. Like throwing them down to me and saying, ‘Look! Talk to them.’” There’s little doubt, though, that after they get an earful of the lovely Falling Off the Lavender Bridge, pretty much all of them will be swooning.
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