Luke Temple: Not Like Other Dudes With Guitars

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I don't really cover, nor do I listen to, "songer/songwriters"—so I'll call Brooklyn-based Luke Temple a man with guitar and a beauty of a voice. It's a warm, reedy sort of vocal style that goes very high and hits you very hard.

Temple, along with four backing musicians (one of whom used to play with Jeff Buckley and is such an insanely talented drummer I can't even say) performed at Joe's Pub last night to celebrate the release of his latest, Snow Beast. His tunes sounded far more direct live than they do on record, err, stream. But most important, they sounded like him. And that's a big compliment to an artist working in a genre where reference points often outshine the artist's own material. Spend some time with the tunes on his Myspace page and see what you think. Recommended.