The People's Temple don't sound so much like a garage-rock band circa 2011 as they do a garage-rock band circa 1966. They aren't just vaguely reminiscent of Love or the Seeds or Out of Our Heads-era Stones, they're practically the spitting image, scuzzy and scrappy and, most of all, urgent. That last one they nail time and again on Sons of Stone, their rollicking debut. Though the sounds they mine may be familiar, they hit on the same quality that makes Nuggets-era rock'n'roll so exciting: that leave-it-on-the-line feeling that these guys are putting a summer's worth of lawnmowing money at risk to lay this racket down.
Cramming 14 songs in just over 40 minutes, the People's Temple get a lot done in a small space. Melodies skew and sputter, and there's a muscular, MC5-style proto-punk grind to a few of these tunes that underlines the band's Michigan roots. Frontman William Young's got a voice as familiar as his band's sound; he's Arthur Lee one minute, Sky Saxon the next, with a little Iggy and Mick on the songs that call for it. Despite its brief runtime and shambolic sonics, there's a sense of scale and dynamism at play that sometimes suggests the Who's grander late-60s material, and hints of Spacemen 3 drone and Brian Jonestown Massacre's anything-goes whirl pop up. All this lends their taut songcraft a certain richness without shattering its heady throwback vibe.
But to get bogged down in the details of Sons of Stone is to miss its point: This is a juiced-up, manic, genuinely fun rock'n'roll record powered more by the urgency of its forebears than any specific sonic similarities. It takes opener "Sons of Stone" a second or two to get going, but once its guitars start to wind around each other, you're caught in its tangle. The rumbly melody of Love-like "Led as One (Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum)" is a real brain-sticker, and when Young does his call on jangler "Visions of the Sun", the urge to respond is simply too great. Sneaky melodies rendered at insistent tempos seem to pour out of these guys, and their passion is palpable; what they've tapped into here feels almost primal. So while Sons of Stone is a throwback record, it's not a stodgy retread; it strikes an electrifying balance, recreating not just an era's sound, but its spirit.
