A Hand Through The Cellar Door

by Luke Temple

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Carolyn Michaels A meditative album with fully-fleshed stories tucked between the notes Favorite track: The Birds of Late December.

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1.	Estimated World 03:14	buy track
2.	The Birds of Late December 03:15	buy track
3.	Maryanne Was Quiet 06:15	buy track
4.	Smashing Glass 04:57	buy track
5.	The Case of Louis Warren 07:45	buy track
6.	The Complicated Men of the 1940s 04:26	buy track
7.	Ordinary Feeling 05:36	buy track
8.	The Masterpiece Is Broken 04:57	buy track

about

I want to call Luke Temple a disciple of Hank Williams and Roger Miller. I want to call him an avant-garde traditionalist. I want to say he’s got an unmatched intuition for the askew. I want to say his only real contemporary peer is another master songsmith named Cass McCombs. I could make a pretty infallible case for any of these statements. But at the end of the day, it’d be adding too many bells and whistles to what his new album is. At its core, it’s one of the year’s most stunning folk records. You should just let Temple’s high-and-lonesome salve of a voice raise your goose-pimples from their dormancy. You should let his insightful, devastating lyrics make tiny, tender tears in your soul.

'A Hand Through the Cellar Door' is, in many ways, Temple’s most straightforward collection of song-storying tunes to date. There are tales of dysfunctional, broken homes and of dysfunctional, broken people. “Birds of Late December,” with its fluttering, nimble fingerpicking, paints an exacting but impressionistic portrait of divorce through the eyes of an exceptionally wistful child. In both “Maryanne Was Quiet” and “The Case of Louis Warren” we follow two characters whose lives unravel in very different ways, though their central question is the same: After you shed all the things you think make you who you are, what is left? Temple is creating small, confident stories with a massive scope — like a good Alice Munroe story. Album standout “The Complicated Men of the 1940s” is a thought experiment concerning the sacrifice of a passing generation, where the heroes of yesterday seem like the stuffy, old guard to a new generation that’s grown just a bit too entitled to their comfort.

But this being Temple and all — the creative mind behind Here We Go Magic — nothing is really ever so straightforward. The arrangements, kept to a minimal drums/guitar/bass/string set-up here, expand and contract in unexpected ways.Temple writes with the eye of a painter like Eric Fischl. Whereas Fischl will put a subtle provocative image in the margins of a piece to create a feeling of imbalance, Temple will add a guitar hiccup or a just-behind-the-beat string section to create a sensation of everything being slightly off. And in that imbalance, both artists show us grace. Yes, while the tales Temple weaves are bleak, the aura of hope never quite fades from the picture. He turns the tragedies of human folly into a celebration of our eccentricities.

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released November 11, 2016

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Luke Temple Inverness, California

Luke Temple's Both-And is a record encompassing both the beautiful and the jarring, both the bright pop-hooks of Temple's work with Here We Go Magic and a thrilling experimental bent with songs looking directly at living within time passing

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