Rowdy crowds aren’t that unusual-they’re often a hazard of live performances. “Dev, I looooove you,” he slurs the entire night, dousing me now and again with Budweiser. But I’ve got my own drunken lout to contend with, a self-proclaimed “guy from Jersey” who’s three times the size of the ejected whippersnapper. Eventually, security guards drag the lad away. I see Jen and Luke again they’re attempting to fend off a shit-faced twentysomething pipsqueak wearing a wee backpack and tube socks. Whereas the Maxwell’s audience was energetic and engaged, at Bowery it’s outright rowdy. Two nights later, the much larger Bowery Ballroom is also jammed, but with a very different crowd. They clearly love playing music together, and a sense of joy and abandon permeates the packed space. The band delivers a giddy hour-long set, the four musicians grinning at one another throughout. Tonight is my first time seeing Lightspeed Champion it’s their first major U.S.

I sum up their comments in my notebook: “Loves Star Wars. The two of them, who say they’re friendly with the band, give me some pointers about Dev. When I tell them I’ll be interviewing the band’s driving force, Dev Hynes, in a couple of days, Jen raises her eyebrows. I’ve just met Jen, 22, and her husband Luke, 27, as we’re waiting for June’s Lightspeed Champion show to start at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. The songs are, by turns, witty, eccentric and often oddly moving: the lovelorn “Midnight Surprise” is his epic, 10-minute voyage into hook-laden power-pop “No Surprise” is a Fleetwood Mac-inspired tribute to his mother Wendela “I Could Have Done This Myself” a bittersweet memoir of losing his virginity while Roddy Frame would kill to be able to once again write songs like the jaunty, tragi-comic shuffle “Everyone I Know Is Listening To Crunk”.Whatever you do, don’t ask him about the hat,” she says. Recorded in Omaha by Saddle Creek’s resident producer Mike Mogis, it’s about as far as you can get from the boisterous electroclash of Test Icicles, recalling an improbable hybrid of Wilco, Aztec Camera and Todd Rundgren. It’s fitting that this debut contains at least half a dozen exquisite songs that could work in any idiom, although Hynes’s default setting – Americana-tinged acoustic rock, peppered with major-sevenths and flecked with the subtle use of pedal steel, strings and woodwind – suits his material perfectly. His personal taste has always been a much broader church – Broadway musicals, 80s hair metal, thrash punk, country, hip hop – and he claims to “obsess over songwriting to the point where I hear the song rather than the genre”. He remains best known, however, as guitarist in the agreeably silly electro punk trio Test Icicles, who amicably split up last year because, as Hynes puts it, “we never really liked our music”. The Houston-born, Essex-raised, Dalston-based maverick has called himself “Dev Metal”, “IVed” and “Nigga Bullshit” formed a glam metal project called the NLS Crew, collaborated with Michigan’s Whirlwind Heat, and joined an indie, ahem, supergroup called Naked Babes. Devonte Hynes‘ CV reads a bit like a Mighty Boosh parody of east London’s incestuous indie world.

Lightspeed chamion