Treasure finders Heavenly recordings hold some of the brightest gems of contemporary British music. Along with TOY and Charlie Boyer & The Voyeurs, they have just released the eagerly awaited album of prodigious newcomer Temples. The Kettering band surfaced eighteen months ago and received lavish accolades in a short amount of time.
Judging on their incandescent debut album, all that praise is well-deserved.
The four-piece have many tricks up their sleeve, they first and foremost have a striking ear for melody and the talent to make a song “universal”, that is to instantly make it a hit. This a quality they partially acquired from their various influences, amongst which The Byrds and The Zombies seem the most prominent.
The four-piece have many tricks up their sleeve, they first and foremost have a striking ear for melody and the talent to make a song “universal”, that is to instantly make it a hit. This a quality they partially acquired from their various influences, amongst which The Byrds and The Zombies seem the most prominent.
Temples are clever enough to channel those influences whilst adding painterly detail and leaving nothing to chance.
What makes the band remarkable is primarily its obvious gift for instrumentation, chord progressions and astounding vocal harmonies (“Move With The Season” is one of the most vocally heartmelting songs I have heard since "Wild Mountain Thyme").
They also insert underlying esoteric textures in some of their most ambitious tunes, starting with the self-titled track “Sun Structures”, taking the listener to a higher and more metaphysical ground, which is echoed in the bedazzling “Sand Dance”, the most original song on the album. You will find other hints of that in the intros to “The (wondrous) Golden Throne” and to “A Question Isn’t Answered”. Given the excellence of those tunes, they could probably make their next full album a book of exotic tales, a sort of psychedelic Arabian Nights.
As a whole, Sun Structures keeps you on tenterhooks with blooming pop patterns bursting with solar energy whilst weaving a colorful mosaic of quirks and twists.
The ultimate track “Fragment’s Light” makes a perfect ending to the record with its poetic epilogue structure, it has this troubadour charm about it that somehow reminds of “The Battle of Evermore”. This ellipsis might be the bridge to the band’s next effort.
2014 has just started but Sun Structures is already a hot contender for the album of the year. Seeing that Temples are aptly-named, they may also become England’s new favorite worship. Sun Structures was released on Heavenly recordings on February, 10th 2014.
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