Temper Trap, The - Conditions (Album)
» The Temper Trap Return with Self-Titled Album, First Single 'Need Your Love' Out March 27! - March 8, 2012
» Big Day Out 2010 - Claremont Showgrounds, WA - January 31, 2010
» Big Day Out 2010 - Royal Adelaide Showground, SA - January 29, 2010
» The Temper Trap get spicy - June 23, 2009
Conditions is moody and atmospheric, is at times big and others stripped back to basics, and at all times driven by an insatiably beat continually propelling us forward through space and time. Oh, and did I mention the songs are catchy as fuck?! The Temper Trap are promising big things both at home and abroad with recent appearances at South By Southwest in the US, and their song featured in the indie flick 500 Days of Summer which played at the recent Sydney Film Festival.
The disc starts off with Love Lost which kind of sounds like Interpol if they had a singer with a higher pitched voice. The track is chilled, perfect indie pop, starting off small and gradually building to a densely layered and well crafted song. Rest continues along these lines, and we're starting to really be intrigued by the voice of lead singer Dougy Mandagi. This strange alto voice, which while Mandagi can maintain common lower notes whilst also hitting these glorious highs without crossing into the realms of tacky falsettos. The beat and rhythm is great and propels this song forward along with just the right amount of distortion and fuzz thanks to band members Jonathon Aherne on bass, Lorenzo Sillitto on guitar and Toby Dundas on drums.
And then BAM! Here comes our radio number one to smack us in the face. Trance-like guitar, angelic vocals and that persistent kick drum intro provide the perfect build up to the crescendo that is Sweet Disposition. This song will be a radio killer - somewhere along the lines of when Youth Group crossed over from being indie nobodies to mainstream Aussie darlings with their cover of Forever Young. This song was the perfect accompaniment to the recent teaser clip for movie 500 Days of Summer - which both compliment each other with their sheer indie perfection - their cute but not too cute, cool but not too cool, one of those examples of perfect pairing of film and song. The video clip for this song isn't too bad either, space explosions and rhythmically intersecting geometry and a roller-skating lady in a gold onesie, how can you go wrong?
The rest of the disc is generally pleasing bar some minor disappointments, Down River, Science of Fear and Fader are perfectly inoffensive indie pop, but not high points on the disc, they don't show us anything new so they're really a bit of a non-event (but they still have that great radio sound, so really who cares what I think).
Soldier On slows everything right down and really highlights the nuances in The Temper Traps' sound - the slightly off-slant timing of the vocals, the sheer energising quality of Mandagi's vocals and his ability to slip between something normal, something high pitched, and at times, an almost Devendra Banhart like warble which I really love. Having restrained for most of the song, the band finally indulge themselves in some amplification, which is nice I guess, and creates juxtaposition but I wonder if maybe this song could have been something more. If the original vibe of the song had been maintained this would have been so so so perfect, perfection wrapped up in brown paper and tied up with string, but instead they make it sound just like the rest of the songs on this release, which I find really disappointing but will probably go unnoticed by many.
Fools gives Temper Trap some breathing room and shows us something a little different. It's melancholy and happily disenchanted, like walking away from a bad experience with a reconfirmed and strengthened notion of what you need to be doing in life, which is a pretty sweet sensation, even if its coming from a song. There is a tenderness about this song that you don't quite hear in the other tracks.
Resurrection starts off promising me so much, that maybe, just maybe they won't make the sound big. It showcases Mandagi's vocal abilities as well as the rest of the band as they strip the song back to the basics but still have such a spark, and such a joy in the sound. But, of course, how could they resist - they go big again, giving into amplification and grandeur when they might have benefited a little more from holding back a little.
They end the disc with a great rambling beach guitar horror song, which sums it all up and winds it all down. The Temper Trap take us on a really nice journey, there's a few disappointments for me, in that the songs adhere too much to this small sound vs big sound dynamic, but it's solid, and it has the perfect indie pop sound that will surely conquer the airwaves over the next few months.
