Temples

Temples came to Rescue Rooms in Nottingham....
Temples : Live

Temples : Live

It is the week after Alex Turner (Arctic Monkeys) had given his keynote address on the state of the rock and roll animal, declaring that, “It’s ready to make its way back through the sludge,” and “Yes it may have faded but it will never die.”  At a sold out Rescue Rooms in Nottingham on Thursday, 27th February, it was time to see if Turner’s claims rang true, or was it just another young man prodding the corpse to keep his career alive?

The band on offer was Temples, Heavenly Records latest ‘psychedelic mannequins’ offering up their particular brand of watered down transcendentalism.  Their progress over the last year has been staggering, with prestigious support slots, including Suede and Primal Scream, as well as appearances at some of the more distinguished summer festivals.  Their debut album went top ten on the British charts and with the promotional tour mostly sold out, it has been a stratospheric ascent compared to some of their contemporaries.  QRO have featured them twice in recent months with reviews on their particular sugary brand of “Britadelica”.  First was a live encounter in December last year when they supported Primal Scream in Manchester (QRO live review), whereby the question raised was whether they had the ‘appetite for destruction’ of the headliners?  Secondly, was a review of their debut album Sun Structures (QRO review), in which it was discussed whether it was a valid artist statement to pick a small segment of musical heritage and create a subsequent record without any additional embellishment of originality.  What Walt Whitman describes as, “Needing good audiences to have good poetry” must also apply to the rock and roll circus.  Instead of that, we had some Orwellian nightmare of a blank faced congregation staring at the stage with no discernible bodily movement except for roaming eyes to check out who looked most like Brian Jones, deep in their cosmic funk of unusophobia.  The light show could have been replaced with twin screens, consisting of Noel Gallagher (who has eagerly championed their cause) and Turner barking out their shallow platitudes on the state of music, “In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.”

TemplesWhitman (again) was also a believer in Transcendentalism, or expanded consciousness.  This hit its heights in the psychedelic ‘60s, with the birth of ‘hippiedom’, an era that Temples are eager to suck the last remaining juice from, leading to today’s baby-boomers and the disillusionment of the Me Generation of the 1970s and ’80s.  The search for enlightenment and higher consciousness gave way to the passion for “sex, drugs and rock and roll.”  Now, however, with the aging and pending retirement of the boomers, the maturation of the Me Generation, and the disillusionment of their following generations, it appears that the search for transcendent experience is once again waxing rather than waning.  This was sadly reflected in the insipid and vacuous entertainment presented by the band, maybe it was doing them a disservice and a complex study of their ethos is more than they deserve in their fledgling career.  They served up an hour of jangly pop tunes; the lead singer (James Bagshaw) is the identikit rock waif complete with bolan-esque hair and face glitter who created the right shapes and angles impeccably.  Unfortunately there was no emotion, no peaks and troughs, just a sterile show of sickly blandness; Big Brother may have been watching, but for how long?

Temples

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