Rejoice! Dutch Epic Psychedelic Rockers Temple Fang have self-released two new albums - and just like four of the seven releases I already had in my collection from them, they both begin with the two words "Live at".
TEMPLE FANG - Live at Sonic Whip (LP) (2026)
"Live at Sonic Whip" basically is a live version of LP 1 of the fantastic first studio album double album "Lifted From The Wind", containing the two each side-long tracks "The River" and "Once". Of course both songs more than live up to their studio recordings.
Temple Fang are just a class of their own on stage, always living their music to the fullest and letting it find new ways and waves of expressing itself. Even when they don't change much about the structure of a song, and even though their music in general is rooted in deeply familiar Blues, Psych and Prog traditions, it always somehow feels fresh and new.
On "Once" they even add some special sauce with the guest performance of Mees Vullings (Heath / The Bird Experience), who adds an exciting extra level of greatness to the piece with his signature amplified harmonica playing. This is everything you want from this band and more. Definitely among Temple Fang's peak recorded performances!
The record is housed in a simple hand-stamped and numbered cover, just like their 2020 full-length debut "Live at Merleyn". Very nice.
Temple Fang are just a class of their own on stage, always living their music to the fullest and letting it find new ways and waves of expressing itself. Even when they don't change much about the structure of a song, and even though their music in general is rooted in deeply familiar Blues, Psych and Prog traditions, it always somehow feels fresh and new.
On "Once" they even add some special sauce with the guest performance of Mees Vullings (Heath / The Bird Experience), who adds an exciting extra level of greatness to the piece with his signature amplified harmonica playing. This is everything you want from this band and more. Definitely among Temple Fang's peak recorded performances!
The record is housed in a simple hand-stamped and numbered cover, just like their 2020 full-length debut "Live at Merleyn". Very nice.
TEMPLE FANG - Live at dB's (Tape) (2026)
Do we already want to listen to these songs again? Yeah, why not? Why not even longer? "Live at "dB's" features a version of "Once" which runs nine minutes longer than usual, so the track alone reaches the half-hour mark. More than another half of an hour in comparison to "Live at Sonic Whip" is added with two more tracks from the recent studio album, "Harvest Angel" and "Josephine". And that's still not all, because this show recorded in Utrecht started with the classic "Gemini", so the quartet treats us with all in all over ninety minutes of magnetic instrumental performances and fantastic vocals leading to pure Psychedelic bliss.
Sadly there is something serious to critique here, and it's not that the sound is a bit rawer and could use a little more brilliance here and there (not to keen on the uncomfortable way the low end is booming sometimes), but it actually is the total length. And no, I'm not getting bored by the music, but appearantly it's just too much music for the poor pink cassette shell supposed to carry it!
There is some physical friction and drag at the beginning, which simply makes it impossible to play that thing, unless I spool forward by hand until I'm a minute in (where thanks to a long guitar intro not that much has happened yet). I still have the feeling that the whole tape then still spins a little bit too slow... and expectedly a minute before "The River" ends the tape decelerates and stops again.
I love me my tapes (as evident in my ongoing cassette craze chronicles), but this one I'm afraid can only serve as a nice-looking haptic addition to the digital Bandcamp release. Of course I can only speak of my own copy, maybe the shell is somehow just glued together a bit too tightly and I could actually fix it... or completely ruin it while trying... Nah, better live with it as it is. And that, dear labels and artists, is one example of why you should always provide a download with your releases!
