“The sun came out just for us. And for my pale skin. And I don’t have sunscreen so let’s do this.” Luckily for Karen Elson, her band wasn’t quite ready to go at that point and the false start gave someone in the audience a chance to offer some of her sunscreen, which was gladly accepted.
Elson offered to present us with her “sardonic English comedy show” while the band (which included a fantastic harpist) got things ready but that never materialised. What we got instead was a taste of the songs off of her upcoming sophomore album Double Roses, the title track of which was named for a Sam Shepard poem. “It’s all about the Texas landscape,” she explained, which made performing it in Texas quite appropriate.
Also quite appropriate for a sunny Texas afternoon was the sun-baked, hazy psychedelia of Temples, whose organ driven retro psych rock manages to somehow come across as both heavy and as light as air at the same time.