Luke Temple's biography mentions his job at a candy shop in California, a time when he slept in the forest for a year, and painting murals on apartment walls for rich New Yorkers. An artist turned musician, Luke Temple discovered that a four-track layers audio the same way an artist slathers paint, though the former offered him endless chances for reconfiguration. His story, and even this easy equation ("music is painting"), builds the gentle naiveté that runs throughout Temple's second LP.

"Saturday People" leads off Snowbeast and it's easily Temple's strongest song and showcases everything that's good about the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist. Temple's banjo carries the brisk waltz through dynamic shifts that move him from a easy lope to a section of harmonies straight out of an early CSNY record. In fact the lines "People/ Looking-glass people/ Saturday people/ Will live one final time," when sung in that harmony (and perhaps coupled with the over-the-top "A mescaline freak-out in an off-Broadway show in the morning") invoke a variety of romanticized and alienated imagery that's snatched straight from a time when squares were there to be looked at and made strange. In that sense, "Saturday People" is a period piece, or maybe a period triptych. Aside from the outro, the song's three parts are miniature gems grouped by time signature and quasi-pyschedelic inflections; they refract and reflect each others' brilliance.

"Saturday People" is solid through and through, and it's really no surprise that Temple can't keep up the momentum through the rest of the record, the song really is twice as good as anything that follows. Most of the rest of the songs seem to hinge on one melodic idea that comes and goes. Consequently, I spent most of my time waiting for those moments to crop up. In "Medicine" an almost-dramatic minor-key melody lends the opening line ("Better take your medicine") a paternalistic threat that simply peters out as the song progresses, only to revive itself when the hook returns. But it dies away again as it turns out, "your medicine was love." Oh. It's always disappointing when a songwriter tries to decode his music for the listener, but when it turns out that the equation is "x=love," there's no hope for redemption.

Yet it's no surprise that the "answer" to the question "What is 'medicine'?" is "love." It's a totally conventional answer, and "Medicine" is a conventional song by design. Another acoustic slow-poke, "People Do", follows similar constraints. Though it showcases Temple's strange, lovely voice and those harmonies again, there is little to listen for besides the sheer pleasure of hearing his vocal turn miraculously from bloodless to soulful with just the slightest application of vibrato.

The acoustic tracks are few and far between, though. For the most part Temple favors a melange of tinkling synths and keyboards. When he uses them for their rhythmic qualities, as on "Family Vacation", he's on firm footing, threading his melodies through a Timbaland-ish tom beat until the frenetic releases that serve as choruses. "Family Vacation" is a fun track, and it's woefully brief. More often, though, Temple uses his keyboards as texturing devices, and he tends to favor sounds somewhere in the range of his voice. This means that a song like "Serious", though it's a fine song, suffers from treble overload. The lone bass cannot support the layers and layers of high-end piled upon it.

Temple is a relatively young songwriter and this, his second full-length, shows promise. Its unevenness seems like a result of his struggle with ideas, rather than a lack of ideas worth filling out. The fuller the palette he works with, the better the result. Such a frail, pretty voice needs something to support it, and in songs like "Saturday People" where it finds itself in a niche carved out especially for it, rather than adrift on a see of aimless synths, Temple's various gifts amplify each other.

-Jessica Suarez, February 01, 2008