As it turns out, I’ve managed to write a bit about Luke Temple, a singer/songwriter, visual artist and producer, best known for being the creative mastermind behind the genre-defying recording project Art Feynman. Up until recently, Art Feynman has been strictly a solo thing, a way for Temple to explore surprising sonic landscapes without the burdens of identity.
His soon-to-be-released Art Feynman album Be Good The Crazy Boys is slated for a Friday release through Western Digital, and the album sees Temple radically changing up his creative process: Recorded live in-studio with a full band, the album reportedly captures a spirit of restless anxiety while recalling Talking Heads, Oingo Bongo and others. “Sonically, I was inspired by records that were recorded at the late Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas such as Grace Jones‘ Private Life, Lizzy Mercier Descloux‘s Mambo Nassau, and Talking Heads‘ Remain in Light.”
And yet, despite those now classic references, the album’s material is firmly rooted in contemporary concerns.
Throughout his career, Temple has long specialized in a sound that draws from and meshes slightly twisted tasks on Komische musik, worldbeat and art pop. But with Be Good The Crazy Boys, Temple delicately balances dark thematic concerns like struggling to maintain balance in a toxic, chaotic and mad mad, mad world with dance floor friendly, hypnotic grooves.
“To me, there was a lot of energy that needed to be released as the result of living in isolation for six years,” Temple explains. “It also seems to speak to a general anxiety we’re all holding, but it’s expressed in a cathartic way.”
In the lead-up to the album’s release later this week, I’ve written about three of the album’s released singles:
- “Desperately Free,” a a Fear of Music/Remain in Light-like jam built around twinkling tropicalia-inspired percussion and a hypnotic groove paired with chanted and call and response vocals. “Desperately Free” manages to simultaneously evoke sweaty summer nights on the dance floor and the yearning for something more than our mere existence. “I was thinking about the obsession with spiritual growth or with ‘curing’ death and the compensatory consequences that ensue as a result,” Temple says. “We can’t cheat nature of which we are one and the same, she’ll find balance eventually.”
- “Passed Over,” a breezy and kaleidoscopic, tropicalia-meets-80s New Wave-inspired bop that channels Talking Heads, Zazou Bikaye‘s Mr. Manager and others — but with a soulful yacht rock sax solo from Nicole McCabe. Thematically, the song explores struggling with FOMO with the song’s narrator stubbornly and defiantly saying I’m ok to be passed over/ Let them have it/I don’t care. “It can be refreshing to decide to eat last, it’s stressful if you’re always needing to be at the front of the line,” Temple explains.
- “Early Signs of Rhythm,” continued a remarkable run of funky tracks that seamlessly meshed krautrock/kosmiche musik, world beat and art pop in a way that will remind folks of Fear of Music and Remain in Light-era Talking Heads and Grace Jones’ “Pull Up To The Bumper” — but with a No Wave-like sax solo and references to Abraxis, a figure of both good and evil in Jungian mythology. Fittingly, the song is a meditation on opposites — both within and without.
Be Good The Crazy Boys‘ last pre-release single “Therapy at 3pm” manages to channel Fear of Music and Remain in Light-era Talking Heads with the song being built around a taught, propulsive bass line, frantic percussion. synths and a soulful No Wave-like horn line. The result is a decidedly tense, uneasy song that Temple explains is about fearing the end of the world, which seems increasingly likely every single day.