Temples’ debut Sun Structures was one of 2014’s surprise packages: an amalgam of pop and florid psychedelia built on a chassis of indie gestalt, Kettering’s very own keepers of the flame took its essence and then successfully exported the dizzy formula around the world.
For many other bands a follow up might’ve been an excuse to take stock, an option which one listen of Volcano will inform the listener was never seriously considered. It’s not so much that this second chapter isn’t a sequel to the predecessor; it’s virtually a total eclipse of it.
A fixation with the past clearly leaves any outfit operating under its aegis with a radical dilemma. On the one hand presumably their audience bought in originally because of a shared rejection of – at least in part – 21st century values, musical or otherwise, whilst the counter lies in alienating them by gratuitously allowing more concessions to the fickle nano-trends of now.
Temples have chosen to meet this problem so head on that at times you simply have to stand by and admire their moxie. What Sun Structures may have lacked in sonic panorama – it was, as lead singer James Bagshaw has pointed out, recorded mostly in the front room of his house without access to even a sub-woofer – Volcano delivers ambitiously, the raw materials leavened by a turn-it-up-to 11-ethos. It feels like the only studio tool missing is the kitchen sink: opener Certainty fires up with a few bars of reedy vibes before spiralling toward a mellotron-dominated canopy of end-of-the-pier chutzpah, Bagshaw’s falsetto and some taut drums larupping along with a bracing gusto, setting a meter and tone from which the quartet barely waiver throughout.
Admirably self producing, the quartet are also keen to stress that the writing process is a shared one, a co-op approach which explains a more disparate thread of influences than bystanders might have thought. Some will have pre-assumed inspiration being mainlined from late 60’s pop culture of course, but also in the background are Empire Of The Sun (How Would You Like To Go?) psychotropic yanks MGMT (Celebration) and most obviously Tame Impala (most of everything else).
It goes without saying here also that some suspension of your cool gene is required to really partake, especially when Bagshaw is dead panning lines on Oh The Saviour like, “On a vault on the molten lava/Standing up like a wild impala/standing down like a weekend martyr”. They wouldn’t be the first outfit to completely dispense with lyrical meaning, but in fact they’re adamant the reverse is sometimes true, closer Strange Or Be Forgotten being so bass Thomas Warmsley claims all about the very modern yang of wanting to have our own fifteen minutes every day of our lives, whilst Roman God-Like Man is an essay in ‘the pernicious effects of narcissism’.
Volcano is a bold record, not precisely hubristic (or narcissistic for that matter) but certainly a turbo charged, upgraded model of the Temples we first experienced. A clutch of mostly excellent remixes commissioned in the lead up to its release nods to one possible sideline for Bagshaw & co, but they’re savvy enough to have realised that time can never truly stand still, edging closer instead to a dimension entirely of their own.
