A Week With Luke Temple's "Snowbeast": Day 2

11 January 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Ryan Baker

You’ll be completely Gerald Ford-like pardoned if you find yourself quivering, withdrawal symptoms setting in during the middle of an afternoon away from the first three official songs on Snowbeast: “Serious,” “Owl Song” and “Saturday People.” One thing that I wanted to say about this album, I thought better of, inspired by these three songs to consider the ramifications of thinking they play into these odd, but identifiable settings. What I was going to say is of no consequence now as it’s a thought that’s been silenced for all time by the great editor in the sky. The thought would have alluded to the cinematic nature of this record and how the able arms and legs could have been appropriately used in multiple scenes for a particular filmmaker, who gets mentioned when music is quirky and off-beat. Move back two spaces if you’re thinking of Cameron Crowe. These songs — all of them on Snowbeast — could go smashingly with that falconing scene and this one with the deep-sea divers or the robbing of a bookstore. But forget that. The songs — here exhibits No. 1-through-11 — are not larks. They aren’t flighty and killer in their exiguity. They are bossomed and definite dealings in thoughts that could very well be asking the biggest question of all, “What’s the point in all of this that we do?” Love is questioned — as it should be — and the power of it over us is as well. Temple sings in “Serious,” And if I send you bags of bone and blood/Would you not refuse my love/It’s serious.” The best idea in this song is the one that suggests that the severity of a love/crush is manageable and answerable with the choice of the right gifts to give. To give the beloved bones and blood is to give all and that cannot be dismissed so slightly. But it is dismissed over and over and Temple does a fantastic job of tackling that thought. There is much lonesomeness on the record, just from more songs like “Serious,” where one side is reaching out, seeking a touch and fondling open air or a cold kettle, getting the non-response it probably didn’t deserve.

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