A flock of corellas squawks as a car revs to life; a Land Cruiser, probably. Singer and guitarist Blake Scott (originally from the country himself) gears down into a talk-sing, heavy on the ‘strine: “My wife’s father was the family patriarch, a detective Sergeant, that’s how I started”. The song, Constable, ends with the purr of an idling motor.
The Peep Tempel follow in the grog-rock tradition of The Cosmic Psychos without banking on our fondness for the boorishness. My soft spot for the Psychos is a legacy item – newcomers don’t get that latitude. Not that they need it. The Peep Tempel’s brilliance lies in inhabiting what they critique. They crawl inside the dusty, drunken skin of the constable and the repellent, cricket-loving miner on Kalgoorlie who slurs: “I’m salt of the earth, assaulting the earth”.
Scott’s voice swaggers from burly punk bully on Rayguns to affected git on Totality and while the characters are bleak the songs boil over from verse to shout-a-long chorus in a way that’s pure pleasure.
