By Berlinda Recacho
I'm far from being a completist; sometimes I think it's more useful to pick and choose and keep what resonates. The track "Certainty" from Temples' self-produced 2017 album Volcano played on my mental turntable for the first half of that year, and I've returned to it consistently since. Using "Certainty" as a touchstone, I explored Exotico, looking for similar catchy grooves and rhythms, while recognizing the confident arrangements of balanced elements in Sean Ono Lennon's production of this new album from Temples.
"Slow Days" quickly emerged as my favorite track. It calls to mind an alt-country tune you might have discovered while scrolling through the radio dial in the late Seventies. Incorporating a pedal steel reverb effect adds a melancholy reverie. The lyrics frame a contradiction: "These days/slow days/go speeding on by, speeding on by". The time in your head (kairos) runs on a different schedule than time in the world (chronos). The vocals spiral into an echoing round at the end of the song, easing into the realization that you will miss an experience, while you're still experiencing it, before it is even over. "Inner Space" takes that same feeling of reverie and charges it with urgency in a futile attempt to keep the present from fading into the past. The title track floats languorously on an ocean breeze, a charged soundtrack to a moody episode ("I fall slowly/I know what I desire") before funneling into 41 seconds of "Sultry Air". There are two other interludes that run under two minutes, acting as section breaks: "Head in the Clouds", a neo-psychedelic noir sketch; and "Movements of Time", an alluring pastiche of Sixties instrumental lounge music.
On the more upbeat side, "Gamma Rays" is a jolt of futurist electronica. Its cool riffs form a plaintive call to action to rise up and dance because there might not be a tomorrow. The dance-y philosophical sweep of "Time is a Light" puts a positive spin on our insignificance in the grand scheme of things: "When your mood is in the rain/Remember the weather will always change/Give it a second chance/Put it down to circumstance". Powerlessness may actually be an advantage if we lean into it. In "Fading Actor", the hapless protagonist tries and fails to stay significant, admitting, "Lately I've found I'm lost in the crowd" with an obsessive, moody fanfare that wouldn't be out of place in an ABBA or Electric LIght Orchestra arrangement. The disconcerting structure of "Oval Stones" reminds me of "Round and Round" by Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, veering from from a yearning guitar riff, to sing-song verses, two looming choruses, and a rising bridge. Surreal images dance around regret and away from direct confrontation: "Swimming in your soul, there was no one in the way/Out of your control was the destiny disdain/Hiding out the way, with the life that's in your head/Every night you stay in a bed inside your brain". Then the song loops back into a desire to do it all again: "Can we go back right now together/Shall we go back right to the start?"
A thread of reflective melancholy imbues all the tracks on the album, a self-awareness that admits that existence is finite, and there is a limit to knowing something completely. Exotico shares the complex and ephemeral qualities of a glittering mirage. In fact, there is a type of mirage called a fata morgana that appears more sophisticated than the common sightings of "standing water' that appear on the road ahead on a hot summer day. It's the same phenomena: Light passing through two layers of air of different temperatures bends light rays that reflect the image of a city in the distance, inverted with the sky below the buildings. When seen from afar, the colliding air masses act like a mirror and the viewer sees "castles" in the air. On the cover of the album, a collage seems to depict a fantastical fata morgana of pastel flowers hovering above the clouds over a sunny beach, a visual clue to the music itself. The album is at its best when layers of keyboards float over guitars, drums, and vocals, forming melodies and harmonies that bend time into a shimmering mirage, borrowing influences from adjacent decades.
Exotico by Temples is out now.
[Photo: Molly Daniel]