Live Review: The Temper Trap, Alpine, Mt Warning

If you are heading down to Groovin' The Moo over the next few weeks, plan to arrive early and lend your ears and heart to tonight's two excellent local supporting acts, who are also on that festival's line-up. Mt Warning, headed by Byron Bay musician Mikey Bee, stirs our senses with a delicate balance of lyrical songwriting and finely nuanced harmonies. Their songs startlingly capture the fingerprints of memories and the pregnant pause between adolescence and adulthood. Alpine follow up not far behind with breathy, iridescent cooing on a background of clean, retro notes – the effect is both mesmerising and calming. Their debut album A Is For Alpine would enliven any dull morning.

The Temper Trap arrive onstage in a hail of blood red strobing lights. They open with Love Lost before lead singer Dougy Mandagi greets the home crowd warmly and the band launch into Fader. Melbourne's cold winter may have tickled Mandagi's vocal chords a little during the evening though – the band restart Rabbit Hole after the high notes in the opening lines prove a little too challenging for him to sustain. He laughs it off however, and thanks the audience for their patience and kindness.            

Having already done a promotional tour here early last year to launch their eponymous second album, Mandagi attributes the band's absence since then to working on new songs – “We've been away writing, writing and shit, and stuff, you know. Trying to get creative.” 

As a sneak preview of what they've been cooking up at Byron Bay in Mandagi's backyard, they perform Summer's Almost Gone, a dreamy, aching number with Mandagi's strong vocals skimming over the surface of a melancholy melody. 

Warnings have been given, but the generous use of strobing lights do little to enhance the band's material. And the wide, naked stage at Festival Hall leaves no room to hide for the army of sound technicians who scurry about throughout the evening, checking on lines and called by Jonathan Aherne to inspect his guitar feedback just before the last song in the encore, Sweet Disposition. But despite these hiccups – including several unusual sound checks preceding a few of their songs – The Temper Trap still impress with pure, honest compositions and a strong determination not to be typecast into any definitive style.