The Temper Trap - Sweet Disposition

I could do a music in review every day for several years before I’d run out of ideas. The major problems with doing so is that no one could possibly find me interesting enough to actually read through and listen to that kind of data overload, and also I imagine I would end up repeating myself a lot.

Anyway I got a lot of songs I would like to share with the world that I don’t think the world has discovered yet.

Regional popular trends are interesting in how they vary. In modern society the power of mass media sort of takes the music world by force, language barriers aside the popular music in one country is the same as another. My point is if you compared the top forty in Britain right now it would be similar if not the same to the U.S. top forty, and furthermore Canada’s top forty is probably very, very similar to the U.S. top forty. That is why I find differences so interesting sometimes, I need to point out I only even notice the difference when a song or musician gives me a reason too.

My big brother Sean is a pretty good source of odd ball pop music. He has a very good talent for stumbling upon songs that are different and delightful that I would never hear otherwise because they are never mentioned on regular radio, music television, or my usual channels of music discovery.

Upon his last visit to California, he came across a song that was very, very popular down there. According to him this song was on the radio all the time, and as you may have guessed from the vein of this dialogue, this song is a total unknown up here in Canada.

The Temper Trap is an Australian pop rock group who released their only album so far “Conditions” back in June of 2009, which raises the question, why is this song so popular a year after its studio release? The song in question is “Sweet Disposition,” if you have heard of it, good job, because I never heard anything about these guys until now. The Temper Trap is a decent group but this one song is clearly the stand out on the album, the beat is good and catching, as a pop song should be, and the vocalist is something crazy out of this world. This Indonesian singer has an incredible range on his voice, he sings very high and can change his pitch almost unnaturally, and it is defiantly his singing that is the icing of the cake of this song.

I would dare say this is how pop music should be, catching, and enjoyable, but I have a clear bias here, for all intents and purposes this is also a rock song, and in case you haven’t been paying attention that is my cup of tea. The band even goes so far as to label themselves as an “alternative rock band,” but I’m not buying that, The Temper Trap is really good pop rock, and that’s not a bad thing.

Until next month, keep on rocking in the free world.

- Colin Kelly