Album Review: It'll Be Better by Francis & the Lights

After two stellar EPs, Francis Starlite is finally releasing his first album, It’ll Be Better. Focusing on the potholes in love’s winding road, Better plays like an intimate conversation burning with adoration, promises, and insults. The ’80s pop sound frequently gleams with synthesized keys, and his vocals recall Peter Gabriel in his prime. While there may not be a ”Sledgehammer”-style smash here, this stuff hits just as hard.

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Francis & the Lights' 2010 debut album, It'll Be Better, is a progressive, electronic, and soul-inflected affair that harks back to both adult-contemporary and new wave recordings of the '80s. In that sense, the band will certainly draw favorable comparisons to such icons of the era as Peter Gabriel and David Bowie. To these ends, the uplifting title track and the moody ballad "Get in the Car" centered around lead singer Francis Farewell Starlight's burnished, throaty croon certainly hem closely to Gabriel's literate and atmospherically melodic palette.

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Francis and the Lights has popped up on the bottom half of bills, opening for everyone from Les Savy Fav to Drake, but they’ve never been breathlessly blogged about. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about the band that wasn’t printed on tour posters. I knew they were from New York, I knew I liked their name, and I always thought they could be some hidden treasure the indie populace had yet to uncover.

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