Worshipping Temples at Leeds Festival

As Leeds Festival moves towards peak time and the big names to come to come on the main stage as the night draws in - Vampire Weekend, Queens of the Stone, Paramore - it’s hard to shake off the excitement in the hot packedness of the tent stages.
Temples.Temples.
Temples.

From hotly-tipped, emotional singer-songwriter Natasha North from Buckinghamshire with tracks like The End, shortly to be taken from her forthcoming EP Fire - which might have done better at Ronnie Scotts than on the on the BBC Introducing Stage - to noisy Michigan five-piece La Dispute on the NME/Radio 1 stage.

Led by screaming singer Jordan Dreyer, it’s hard to tell if tracks from this “post hardcore” outfit’s recent album Rooms of the House are creatively ambitious or merely pretentious.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

One thing’s for sure, they’re certainly powerful, packing a dramatic punch from start to finish.

Temples, on the other hand, take a more cosmic if no less dynamic approach on the same stage.

Just about this point last year at Leeds Fest I was watching Tame Impala wow the same venue with a 21st century update of psychedelia based as much on rhythms as guitars.

Although more traditional, the Kettering-based quartet Temples’ anthemic songs, grandoise guitars and long hair seem to make more sense live than on their debut album Sun Structures.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Main man James Bagshaw and his colleague’s medium-paced, modern-day psychedelic songs ripple through the booming canvas in a flood of meaty guitar hooklines the Stone Roses would have been proud of in their heyday, all the way out into the crushed, trampled grass outside.

Mesmerise indeed!