The Temper Trap - Conditions (2009)

Genre: Alternative,Indie(Rock),Pop,Australia GREAT!!!
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Tracklist

1. Love Lost
2. Rest
3. Sweet Disposition
4. Down River
5. Soldier On
6. Fader
7. Fools
8. Resurrection
9. Science Of Fear
10. Drum Song

Hype aside, The Temper Trap’s debut album is like a journey without any real quest, writes CHRIS JOHNSTON.

The Temper Trap are Melbourne’s newest internationalists – festival this, backstage that, record deal this, worldwide that – and the common perception will soon become an accepted wisdom and that will be that debut album Conditions is an epic.

Which is interesting, because it isn’t. It gives a magnificent illusion of being so, however. The music, technically, is spacious. It is, on the surface, “big”. It appears to go a long way, to fly, to travel vast distances, to be on an adventure or a quest or, indeed, on a mythical journey like one of Joseph Campbell’s archetypal cinematic heroes. It is music that is supposed to sound like it has found The Rapture after 80 dark days and 81 blinded-by-the-nights but it’s all a glistening mirage, a strange kind of magic trick.

It’s very good, of course. On a technical level. Like a circuitry diagram might be useful and correct, say. Or an educational video for use in schools. But I think it’s cold, and I think a lot of the apparently epic qualities within it are a conceit. Ironically the songs that reach the highest and strive for the most are the ones which on close inspection are the shallowest. Whereas the best song or two have some real spontaneous-sounding fire within the endless icy tundra of the production job here, a smooth and breathless and beatific soundcard done by the guy who did the Arctic Monkeys. These ones – ‘Fader’ and maybe ‘Fools’ – appear at first to be insignificant filler among the grandiose, radiant serenity of Conditions. But it’s them which turn out to be pretty good.

Strange huh? You wonder where this weird reversal of intent comes from. You wonder why it can happen. One thing I know - it makes you crave little unambitious music with blood that just is what it is. In the big interviews so far The Temper Trap talk about their encyclopaedia of influences and it seems to be a matter of some pride and self-awareness that they have dipped into a whole lot of stuff in the past, as if a liking at some point for drum ‘n’ bass or electronica explains the whole widescreen thing.

"Ironically the songs that reach the highest and strive for the most are the ones which on close inspection are the shallowest."

That kind of thinking – and also the kind of music journalism that allows this to go straight through to the keeper, smacking hard into the gloves, no questions asked, another major label triumph of hype and control – reminds me first of U2 around Achtung Baby when it was all about them listening to Krautrock and My Bloody Valentine and such. It became the point of difference required to effectively market that record, and it worked. It became part of the myth, the accepted wisdom, however fake.

The Temper Trap certainly can tend to sound quite a lot like U2. It’s about the guitar playing, the delay. In ‘Fools’, there’s a looped bit that sounds just like Edge guitars, but it isn’t guitars, which when you think about it is quite an odd thing to do. But it’s also about that Rapture thing: the illusion of reaching for the light. To me what they’ve done with Conditions is pretty much make the perfect sheen-blasted modern commercial rock record where the great depths and great insights through mystery and intrigue are a cipher. This is how I feel about Coldplay and Bloc Party too. And of course U2, or most of it. There’s a distrust, which is a horrible, unwelcome emotion. With Bloc Party and Coldplay I think it’s about them not having a discernable warmth or even sometimes an empathy with the subject matter.

That’s what I think The Temper Trap can tend towards and that’s why the songs that everyone will hear about – or have already heard (this is all quite big-time on NOVA, that perfectly complete bastion of self-satisfaction, safety and stereotype) – are empty vessels. Things like ‘Love Lost’, ‘Sweet Disposition’ and ‘Science of Fear’: of these, ‘Love Lost’, the album’s opening track is perhaps the most wrong, but only because it’s so mathematically right; a puzzle in which the solution is found before the task is even begun. There’s a little lead guitar flourish in it, between the quiet bit and the skyhigh soaring bit, which I would even describe as smug: “… a love was lost and now we’ve found it….”

Which is why a little unprepossessing track like ‘Fader’, buried in the middle with no wank about it all, no grand designs or genetic engineering, is so lovely and so, well, fun. It’s a song about nothing much at all and it’s delicious and full of joy and life and big exhalations. There’s a sun in it and the words describe how that sun can burn the bones. There’s dirt in the song too; it’s not some sterile laboratory experiment. It’s unclean but contagious like ‘Song 2’ by Blur, for example. ‘Fools’ I like because it gets carried away within itself, it goes too far. It misjudges its own journey – so it drones and becomes quite isolated and is informed more by strange electronica and even rave in that piano riff than by anything widely and blithely accepted by the mainstream as the answer to life’s great quest.

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