The Trouble With Templeton - Someday, Buddy

The Guardian 60

(Bella Union)

The past 12 months have been so sad and seismic that it feels as if there’s no more room in the world for additional musical melancholy. Brisbane alt-rock group the Trouble With Templeton are named after an episode of The Twilight Zone, which signals their songs’ late-night, spectral qualities, and bring the sentiment and soundscapes of the moody, spacious guitar bands who still lurk on festival bills but hardly capture the zeitgeist: the Antlers, Sigur Rós, Patrick Watson, etc. Influenced by early Radiohead and the sulky post-rock that used to be celebrated on Pitchfork, frontman Thomas Calder is dedicated to his doom; sometimes sulky (“Don’t make me explain again”), other times slacker. The slow-motion misery of I Want Love is a little too drenched in its own fragile despair, but the lazy, wilted quality of Bad Mistake is better; a tired, grunge-lite lollop, more Stephen Malkmus than all-out macabre.