A Week With Luke Temple's "Snowbeast": Day 5
18 January 2007
tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Ryan Baker
There’s a song on this smashing album called “Dinner Party,” but even without that song title, the idea of a softly playing hi-fi, the lighting playfully dipping its face just right over the table linens and guests as the appetizers, main courses and desserts arrive and a demure, though stimulating conversational interplay happening cross table could have been deduced. The record’s broken up by tiny shards of instrumental tracks that belly up to the low light and give off a ribbon of coolness that sets the tone for the course that follows. Each breakage calms the content down and lets you know that this is becoming heavier. You can feel it in your face, in your back and in your buzz. The wine or whatever booze is being served liberally at the table is setting in and the mouths are opening to send forth the deeper problems to dance with the night’s agenda. We get serious for a second, for a number of seconds and somehow what’s being imbibed is not taking things out of hand, just making heads smoky and able to spill. It’s a revealing record about death, aspects of life that we wish weren’t true, portends and prognostications, however realistic or falsely claiming doomsday’s approach. Temple is a brilliant storyteller and gracious with such higher order arrangement skills as to make these sonnets of dubious consequence feel light. The real problems behind the words may never be meliorated, but that’s what more alcohol is for. The record goes from that first course, when things are being laid out — the loves and such, the intentions — to a middle point where the heart of the record lies in the song “People Do,” where Temple sings, “Pass the milk I’d rather throw/And just lie and say I love you/For its the only thing I know/People do what they don’t mean to do/People live how they don’t mean to live.” And yet the living as such keeps going on, with or without the heart behind it. The first keeper of 2007. There, it’s said.
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