Essentially, 'Life is Sweet!' is a pop album, in the indie vein. And yet to describe it as an 'indie-pop' album would be to far underrepresent the diverse elements to be found on the fifteen tracks here.
For example, lead single 'Marlene' is a rather Morrisey-esque slice of wry pop with a hint of melancholy, but features an unexpected guitar solo of quite colossal proportions, which is incongruous yet strangely fitting.
'Intermission' sounds like one of The Cure's 'Faith'-era B-sides or a snippet from 'Carnage Visors' with its trudging flanged bass, while its counterpart, 'Intermission 2' is a brief snippet of clattering percussion. Then there's the sweeping orchestral vista of 'Faculty of Tears,' a song Neil Hannon would have probably killed to have written.
Not all of the tracks are particularly well realised, or catchy, though: 'Romart' slips into dull, plodding MOR rock-pop, and the second half of the album lacks the zip of the first, with tracks like 'Sweetheart' brimming with bluster but sounding rather lacking in inspiration, and the brief piano interlude of 'Etude Op. 3 "Goodnight Michaelek"' sounding rather like a filler for all of its theatrical bombast.
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The result is an album that's rather patchy and becomes rather tiring by the end, and I can't help but think it would have been better with fewer tracks, placing the emphasis on quality rather than quantity, and not spreading the ideas quite so thinly. Yes, less is more.
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