Temple of Lies – From Sands – Album Review

Temple Of Lies are a Midlands based quartet that first burst on to the local scene back in 2010 and From Sands, their sophomore release, comes three years on from their debut album Monumental and features a handful of re-recorded tracks from that release.

The press release for From Sands name drops Metallica, Clutch and Monster Magnet as a number of influences and fuck it, why not? If you’re going to be influenced by anyone you’d be hard pressed to find anyone better than those 3 rock/metal colluses’! The thing is, these influences are subtle at best. Vocalist Si Shaw occasionally sounds like the Space Lord, Mr Dave Wyndorf, with his sometime deadpan, almost spoken word delivery but that’s about it. If anything, they come across as a house-trained, less belligerent version of Scissorfight.

In fairness, Temple Of Lies do very little wrong on this album, there’s not a bad song to be found amongst the eleven tracks but ultimately it lacks those few bonafide killer moments to really make it stand out from the herd. The likes of “Rope”, “Feed the Greed” and “Fire in the Hole”, with its oft repeated catchy refrain of “There’s a bomb, there’s a bomb. There’s a fire in the hole”, are all thoroughly decent songs but there’s a dearth of memorable hooks to imprint the album on your brain once you’ve finished listening to it.

Temple of Lies are still a relatively new band and From Sands will no doubt go down an absolute treat in some darkened club. They’re beginning to tick all the right boxes – from great big fuzzy, primordial riffs to a rumbling rhythm section that steamrollers all that gets in their way – and if they continue on this upward trajectory they should have a very bright future indeed! 7/10

Source // moshville.co.uk