Luke Temple - Snowbeast Album Review

Luke Temple
Snowbeast
Album Review

When Sufjan Stevens and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie suggest someone has one of the most beautiful voices in pop music, there is a reason to pay attention. A Brooklyn-based songwriter, Temple has the same approach to song structure as Sufjan - start with something gorgeous and see which way it goes. With a voice in the same soaring and hushed angelic space as Jeff Buckley or Jacob Golden, Temple soars over and into some remarkable songs, with a variety of instrumentations. Like great poetry, the songs don't reveal themselves on first reading.

Listen to the whole thing, digest, go back and eventually you build up a sense of what was happening in his head - small stories, stories of small things. What impresses is the way that the songs build texture and feel organically - Snowbeast has almost no verse-chorus-verse structures. Saturday People, the album's opener is maybe the closest to that, and is one of the more immediately accessible, so long as your new folk ears are ready for the Sufjan Stevens-like chorus. Genuinely wonderful.

4/5

Mike Rea