Buzzy Brit Band Temples Play Two This Weekend

By Casey Moffitt in Arts & Entertainment on May 28, 2015 2:30PM

photo credit: James Loveday

We're really curious to check out Templeswho have a pair of shows in our city this weekend. The quartet from Kettering, England is well-steeped in its 1960s revivalist gag. Their debut album, the gorgeously recorded and brutally compressed Sun Structures, drips with sticky melodies fashioned with distant and dreamy vocals over layers of guitars, keyboard washes and a steady backbeat evoking a bygone era of rock. The songwriting on the album doesn't break any molds, but the boys in Temples have enough skill to build fun and catchy, if not overly familiar, songs.

We're really curious to see how the songs transfer from the album to the stage. Sun Structures is rife with layers upon layers of guitars, and background vocals fill a wide range of frequencies. The album features an arsenal of auxiliary percussion and a variety of psychedelic atmospherics. These things are hard to replicate with four guys on stage, so we're interested to see if the songs have enough bones to hold up when they're stripped down to the core.

Although the band gets the "psychedelic" label pinned on it often, the fact is Temples is a pop band with touches of psychedelia filling out the songs. The songs are catchy and fairly tightly written, with most tracks clocking in between the three- and five-minute mark. You won't find any long, drawn out jams on Sun Structures. This should be a benefit for the band as they take their tunes to the stage.

We're especially excited to get a good look at Thomas Walmsley's bass playing. The poor guy is buried in the mix on Sun Structures, but listen hard enough and you can hear that he is killing it back there with bouncy lines and some cool counter melodies. Hopefully we won't have to strain as hard to catch all that he's laying down when we check them out live.

Temples are a well-hyped machine these days with glowing praise from the likes of Johnny Marr, Donovan, Noel Gallagher and Robert Wyatt. Those are some heavy testimonials.

Curious? There's two chances to catch Temples this weekend. They play a sold-out show at Subterranean on Saturday night, but if you don't have a ticket and want to check out one the UK's hottest acts, don't fret. You can catch them at the Do Division Street Fest Sunday evening. Temples performs at the West/Leavitt Stage at 8:45 p.m. and admission is a suggested $5 donation.