mardi 27 mai 2014

The Trouble with Templeton (Rookie LP review, in English)

The Trouble With Templeton is the title of an episode of a famous American series Twilight Zone, during which a nostalgic character revisits its past. No, you didn’t make a mistake, I’m really going to talk about music... The Trouble With Templeton, it is the name that the australian Thomas Calder choose in 2011, to carry his solo project. At that time, he released an album - Bleeders - the clips of Someday Soon of which you can appreciate, I Wrote has novel, and the eponym title Bleeders.
He decides then to surround itself with a whole group, to give a new dimension to T.T.W.T. From a singer-songwriter, he becomes leader of this Brisban band within which we count the guitarist Hugh Middleton, the keyboardist player Betty Yeowart, the bass player Sam Pankhurst And the drummer Richie Daniell. Together they deliver to us, an alternative rock with several reflections, which go from baroque pop to the folk.

With Rookie, their first album as a band, they experiment the genres with a well felt boldness, without ever installing us in a dullness.

Whimpering Child, who is reminiscent of Radiohead, begins the album by introducing us into a rather dark, almost dreamlike atmosphere. The voice of Thomas Calder reaches gradually higher summits, adding to the distress which tells the track.

You are new send us back to the benches of the school, with bittersweets lyrics. The innocence of the vocal harmonies combined in air ropes, wraps us with a comfortable heat.

One of the recurring themes of this album is the loving quest and we find it in Heavy Lifting, who approaches the compromises which we make with oneself when we are attracted by somebody, the drives which we have to control, against whom we fight where those to whom we give in.

We change dynamics with Like a Kid who can echo the mythical I love Rock’n Roll and where we find catchy rhythms and communicating energy which already make us sing " Oh Oh " from the first listening.

The track maybe most standing the out with the album is Six Months In A Cast, of an intensity which soars at a brisk pace. He tells the illusions and the paranoia of which we are capable when we are obsessed by a person. A fantasized relation which pushes us in the worst cuttings off. The clip, incredibly effective, gives to the lyrics an even more tortured dimension.

Climate is the UFO of this album. A pretty short track, rather repetitive, and which gives the impression of an alarm, we feels some kind of urgency, a decline.

I Recorded You dips us back into a spleenic melancholy, a subtly orchestrated blackness, with the voice of Thomas which just fires at random where it is needed.
And it is in the hospital bed that we feel thrown through Flowers In Bloom's lyrics, from the first sentence. This alarming, ethereal universe, where the time is suspended, where flowers always seem new.

Secret Pastures offers us an intimist acoustic stroll, on the surface of feelings.

The complex arrangements and highly varied of Soldiers could destabilize you a little, in balance on the thread, between shouts and rustles which overlap.

Glue brings back a little sun, a lightness in tones, although the words always have an underlying signification.

We end the album with Lint, who resounds as a S.O.S, there is a madness which seizes the track and whom we do not suspect at the beginning.


The Trouble With Templeton is sublime gold mine, Rookie is an album which doesn’t stop being a surprise, due to the musical areas which it crosses with an ease which forces the admiration.

Amandine B.