A Week With Luke Temple's "Snowbeast": Day 1

5 January 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Ryan Baker

Allow me a few minutes to overcome my enchantment. Luke Temple, with what we will call about 40 minutes of silvery, personal pulp, shows that he condones any and all melodies, no matter their dimensions or their forecast. He doesn’t abide by any particular structural mores, just a general belief that the concoctions are memorable and swing sweetly through breezes, like audible tree swings. He’s a fantastic storyteller with an eye for turning those minute details of a life into little pieces of music that can then become memorable. His first full-length, 2004’s Hold A Match For A Gasoline World, was a formal — though quietly released — announcement of Temple’s bottomless gifts for structure and taste. The first exceedingly striking piece on “Snowbeast” is the second song on the disc “Owl Song,” a number that every bit the perfect example of what’s written above. He shuns orthodoxy in his lyrical delivery as do a couple of our finest American birds — Regina Spektor and Nellie McKay. A tiny bridge where Temple offers, “And all the owls sing, ‘Who, who, who-who,’” and it’s as endearing as the segment in McKay’s “Beecharmer” — the coolest song Cyndi Lauper’s been involved with in a decade or more — where McKay mimics a trombone or when Spektor nearly beatboxes in “Fidelity.” Here and there are delightful and inexplicable nods to some of the same sonic experiments The Dismemberment Plan used to mess around with. I swear you can hear part of Emergency & I in this song. You couldn’t possibly need much more reason for exploring.

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Shannon McArdle





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