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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Luke Temple’s “A Hand Through The Cellar Door”

A Hand Through The Cellar Door finds Luke Temple stripping down his performance to the bare minimum. Subtle acoustic bass, quiet drums and occasional string and piano accents support his strummed acoustic guitar, leaving his quiet, expressive singing at center stage. Temple is a literary writer, and many of these songs sound like short stories set to music. “The Birds Of Late December” describes the slow disintegration of a marriage using sparse, bleak images of winter weather. “Maryanne Was Quiet” follows a shy young wife as she descends into madness, attempts suicide and is reborn as a more confident person. On “The Case Of Louis Warren,” a feared bully almost dies in a flaming car crash, only to emerge as a kinder, gentler person. “Ordinary Feeling” and “The Masterpiece Is Broken” are more traditional folk ballads—moody, introspective snapshots of the day-to-day dissatisfactions of ordinary life described with compassion and keen insight.

—j. poet