August 04
The Riverside Th..
No formula to rock magic for Temper Trap
Josh Robertson
January 22, 2010 11:00pm
INDONESIAN rock frontmen can win fans by the millions. Or, if they raise the hackles of the country’s equivalent of the religious Right, they can find themselves in hiding. It takes something like the latter for any of them to attract attention outside the archipelago. The Temper Trap’s Dougy Mandagi, London-via-Melbourne-via-Bali, is the first to do so on musical grounds. The question of what Mandagi would now be doing had he not come to study in Australia 14 years ago is, to the singer’s bandmates, a cause for wisecracks. Toby Dundas, a drummer who met Mandagi working together in a General Pants store, and Lorenzo Sillitto, a guitarist who played pre-Trap in punk bands with Dundas, grin conspiratorially. Sillitto: “Well, he always mentions he used to live in like, a fishing village, maybe he’d be a fisherman.” Dundas: “Pulling the nets in.” Sillitto: “He’d probably have massive arms, he’s already got pretty big arms.” Dundas: “He’d probably be fishing by day and charming the ladies by night with his acoustic guitar down on the beach.” Sillitto: “Maybe even a ukelele.” As it turns out, Mandagi strums a Telecaster like Bruce Springsteen (he does an acoustic cover of Dancing In The Dark live) and the audience could be 15,000 Australian festival-goers shouting his vocals right back at him. It got so loud a few weeks ago in Lorne, Victoria, Sillitto says he couldn’t hear his own voice, or half the stage sound. “That’s never happened before.” The promoter who saw the Falls Festival singalong declared the show, the band’s first of any real note in Australia, a coming of age in their home country (they were stuck in London doing promo when their debut album Conditions dropped here). Dundas goes further, saying it felt like arriving “in a world sense”. “To play in front of an audience of that scale, getting into it so much and having such a great time we all walked off stage with smiles on our faces to think that could have happened,” he says. That so many know the words to their songs, and sing along, is “very, very humbling”, Sillitto says. He will have noticed their single Sweet Disposition has been everywhere: radio, remixes, TV and film, car commercials. It’s memorable for Mandagi’s unfaltering falsetto, stirring group harmonies and a soaring chorus pinned down by Sillitto’s single clean, jangling chord, while bassist Jonathon Aherne spells out the melody and Dundas plays it solid and straight. If the success of subsequent work is to be judged by that benchmark of commercial penetration, Sweet Disposition could prove the albatross around their necks. More important, though, is where the band takes its art from here; whether they can keep achieving rock alchemy via a few simple, not unfamiliar elements. The Temper Trap attract comparisons to a ridiculous number of wildly-varying but uniformly mainstream acts. Even as the names pile up – U2, Prince, Jeff Buckley, Radiohead – the guys are noteworthy for their nonchalant refusal to buck. “We do draw a lot of inspiration from bands that have been going around for a while,” Dundas readily admits. That said, he still feels there aren’t many “young bands coming through that sound like us”. “I don’t think we sound like any of the popular styles and genres that kind of flare up around the world,” he says. From earliest jams to the recording of Conditions (thrice nominated in the 2009 ARIA awards), the band’s sound “definitely evolved”, Dundas says. “I hope that evolution continues to a place where the Temper Trap has a distinct sound, even if there is variation within that.” Sillitto says the approach to songwriting is “very, very democratic”. “The band tries to get fresh songs fast into live sets, where they’re tested and tweaked,” he says. And The Temper Trap live are a better, tougher rock band than when soaked in reverb through a studio console. This should work in their favour during their first extended encounter with the fabled US club circuit: a two-month tour, coast-to-coast. “Personally, I’m a little bit daunted as to the road ahead,” Sillitto says.
No one has left a comment yet.