Conditions by The Temper Trap came a-tumbling, fully formed and delicious, from my ipod yesterday like some amazing test-tube synthesised love child/ gene experiement of 80's soul, Noughties indie and American AOR. I've developed an instinctive suspicion of an music too immediately accessible, but ... ahhh... this lot just s-h-i-n-e. It has that same luminescent joy which burst over the musicverse when the Strokes and then the Killers arrived to rescue rock and the rest of us from stodgy, post-Nirvana grunge. Like those also, there's a vibrant energy and a gloss that's charms you instantly. The blockbuster-big production is superb and reeks of serious major label bankrolling. To be fair though, it does edge dangerously close to sugarfree-MTV-ism, but when the hooks are this good who really cares.
What's going on in Australia that we're now being invaded by credible, mainstream and yet somehow immensely likeable pop-rock? For some reason the TT sound vaguely like cousins, say, of the antecedent Jet - the album is more a collection of pop songs than a coherent piece of work and the indiscriminate poaching and adapting of anything and everything in transatlantic pop history is also a hallmark of australasian music. Done badly this can make the music sound outdated, but done well and it sounds universal and timeless.
So ok, yes, TTT are just a regulation four-piece set of rock boys with guitars. It's such a restricted formula, and yet somehow, it keeps shaking out newly wonderful slivers of delight such as this. One to watch, if they tour hard and long they'll conquer everyone.
Highlights: "Love Lost", "Rest", "Fader"
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