Sun Structures… Anticipation has been Ra-bid

Review: Temples – Sun Structures

Published on February 18th, 2014 | Jonny Abrams

Temples of course are places of worship, and in the case of these Temples it’s all too clear where the worship lies: Sun Structures, their eagerly anticipated debut album, might as well come bearing a list of ingredients reading “Tame Impala (45%), The Zombies (45%), miscellaneous Nuggets gems (10%)”.

Don’t get us wrong, it sounds tremendous – the likes of “Mesmerise” build into the kind of totemic sun structures we were promised, but it all feels overly reliant on production tricks and melodies which, while ornate, feel as if they were grafted straight off someone else’s psych-pop classic and onto Temples’ own de rigueur clatters of fuzzily distorted drums.

Whereas Tame Impala debut Innerspeaker hooked you in instantly with the hypnotic yet disarmingly personal “It Is Not Meant to Be” before knocking you for six with all sorts of left-field whims, Sun Structures never feels as if it’s doing anything of its own accord.

The twiddly guitar lines, fuzzy riffs and ’60s backing vocals are effectively shorthand for psychedelia, while song titles like “Move With the Season” don’t much help in terms of shaking off the overwhelming spectre of their apparent influences.

Bandwagon well and truly jumped, then…and yet it sounds fantastic. In fact, Sun Structures could quite easily be mistaken for an early album of the year contender.

Sun Structures is out now on Heavenly Recordings.

BUY: Sun Structures on iTunes and on Amazon.

Rocksucker says: Three Quails out of Five!

a quail a quail a quail

Artists: temples

About the Author

Jonny Abrams Editor of Rocksucker and the website's founder, Jonny is passionate about the music he listens to, both good and bad, as well as interviewing his favourite musicians.