Luke Temple reviewed
Luke Temple
Snowbeast
(Mill Pond)
Sometime visual artist Luke Temple couldn’t stand the New York art scene so he decided to try his hand at singing. His second album suggests the NYC music realm was a tough fit as well.
You could base part of this argument on Snowbeast‘s “People Do,” which has a downhearted, falsetto’d Hank Williams feel to it before seguing into the most non-plussed CSN&Y outtake in the vaults. Or you could hang on “Saturday People,” which moves like Hawksley Workman laying siege to The Village Green Perservation Society. Perhaps it’s lo-fi folk pop a la Devendra Banhart’s second album that comes forth on “Medicine.” Actually, the most significant thing is Temple’s approach to Snowbeast. People from all over go to New York to be seen — Temple himself left Boston for it. But not a whole lot of them lock up in their bedrooms so they can be alone, and this album is the contents of Temple’s head spilled out onto his pillow and transferred to an 8-track recorder. The official line is he’s examining the world around him, not some fictional place. Whatever. It feels like Temple’s dreaming of a fairy-tale home, and maybe he agrees more than a little with Jim Croce.
— Steve Forstneger
