“Psych” music has been all the rage in underground rock circles the past few years. But like most genre descriptors (indie, shoegaze, noise, et al), once it gained even a modicum of popularity it begin to get applied so widely and loosely so as to have no clear meaning anymore. It seems that anything with fuzz guitars, drifting and ethereal vocals, or droning, atmospheric sonic textures gets tagged “psych.” Little of the contemporary music has any clear connection to the psychedelica of the 1960s. And moreover, once it became a fashionable musical style again, hundreds of new bands flocked to the so-called psychedelic sound – and many of them, frankly, are boring or flat-out suck.
The United Kingdom has produced some of the more interesting bands of the recent psych music revival (or “neo-psych,” as it's sometimes called). It was, of course, U.K. post-punk and indie-pop artists like The Soft Boys, Siouxsie & The Banshees, The Teardrop Explodes, Spacemen 3, and The Stone Roses who led the first large-scale psych revival in the 1980s. So, it perhaps shouldn't be surprising that many of the more exciting modern psych or psych-inspired groups – bands as wide-ranging as The Horrors, TOY, The Koolaid Electric Company, Teeth of the Sea, Gnod, and Hookworms – all hail from the U.K. Perhaps no other new U.K. psych group has been more promising or buzzed about than the Kettering-based Temples.
The duo of vocalist/guitarist James Bagshaw and bassist/vocalist Thomas Warmsley (now expanded to a four-piece for live performances), formed in 2012 as Temples and quickly released a string of mesmerizing singles for the Heavenly label in the U.K.: “Shelter Song,” “Colours to Life,” “Keep in the Dark,” and “Mesmerise.” Johnny Marr and Noel Gallagher became outspoken fans of the group.
Now, in early 2014, Temples have finally emerged with a debut full-length LP, Sun Structures (released through Fat Possum here in the U.S.). And there's little doubt that this will rank as one of the best albums of 2014 come year's end. Temples play a huge, monolithic sounding style of psych rock. The production, which was done by Bagshaw himself in his home studio, is just killer – Phil Spector would approve.
The band is heavily indebted to the poppier side of 1960s psychedelia (The Byrds, The Zombies, Donovan, even The Beatles), but they also combine elements of 1970s glam (a la T Rex) and 1980s-90s shoegaze and dream-pop (Spacemen 3, Loop, Cocteau Twins). To compare them to a contemporary group, they sound a bit like a janglier version of Tame Impala or a slightly meatier version of the Dutch baroque psych-pop wunderkind Jacco Gardner. There are definitely Revolver-style elements of Eastern mysticism on the album, and yet despite the hazy, languid atmosphere the songs are always tight and catchy. Sun Structures really is a near-perfect album, and it'll be a treat to see them pull it off live.
Temples will be playing their first-ever show in Madison on Friday, April 25th at the High Noon Saloon. The show starts at 9:30 p.m. with the hotly tipped post-punk revivalists Drowners opening (who just released their self-titled debut album on Frenchkiss in January).
Andrew Bottomley co-hosts The Way Out, an indie/punk/underground rock music show, Thursday nights at 10pm on WSUM. You can follow the show on Facebook and Twitter, and listen to old broadcasts on The Way Out's blog.
-Andrew Bottemley
