Album Review: Temple Fang, Live at dB’s & Live at Sonic Whip
Some context in case it seems odd that Amsterdam longform psychedelic heavynauts Temple Fang would release two albums at the same time. First, you should know that Live at dB’s and Live at Sonic Whip are the four-piece’s seventh and eighth — whichever is seventh and whichever is eighth; they came out on the same day — live records in the last six years. A lot of what this band does is on the stage.
Second, the two outings are the first live documents the band has issued since 2025’s excellent studio offering, Lifted From the Wind (review here), and they are comprised almost exclusively of material from that 2LP — Live at dB’s opens with “Gemini,” which also appeared on earlier live LPs/tapes — with Live at Sonic Whip being a 40-minute set with just “The River” (19:40) and “Once” (21:03) played, both of which are taken from Lifted From the Wind. Further, considering that runtime from May 2025’s Sonic Whip Festival in Nijmegen, and the fact that Live at dB’s, which was captured in Utrecht last November, runs 93 minutes and includes a 30-minute version of that same song “Once,” it becomes pretty clear that they’re emphasizing different sides of themselves with each one.
Temple Fang are guitarist/vocalist Jevin de Groot, bassist/vocalist Dennis Duijnhouwer, guitarist/backing vocalist Ivy van der Veer and drummer Daan Wopereis, and without believing in ‘blessed’ yet having been blessed enough to see them on multiple occasions, I can attest to the centrality of flow to what they do on stage as well as on their studio releases. And I mean this not only like the songs are groovy and easy-rolling, but in the psychological, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi sense of the word, which relates to immersion on the part of the band in what they’re doing.
The steady unfolding of the aforementioned “Gemini” leading into the dB’s set or Heath‘s Mees Vullings putting blues harp to “Once” at Sonic Whip are standout moments, but they don’t happen without Temple Fang being dug in deep, and they are on both these releases. The flow that you hear comes from the flow, the semi-conscious instrumental conversation happening between these players and their instruments. As “The River” begins to unfurl with Wopereis‘s subtly shredded drumming, the song shares with its Sonic Whip interpretation a faster-seeming tempo than on the studio LP, but it and the rest of the Lifted From the Wind material that follows — “Harvest Angel,” “Once” and “Josephine” — nonetheless breathe.
I don’t want to pull intention out of the narrative of what I’m hearing, which is to say Temple Fang did not and does not happen by accident. Instead, the willfulness happens on the level of the band giving themselves over to the song, or in this case, the show. The dueling solos in “The River” from van der Veer and de Groot setting up the next verse for Duijnhouwer‘s echoing callouts, leading to the harmony with de Groot: “Nothing worse/To want something so bad/And never notice till it’s gone,” before the heavier turn. These things will be familiar to listeners who took on Lifted From the Wind, but one can hear even between Live at dB’s and Live at Sonic Whip that the song breathes differently at the club show than at the festival, and that’s a big part of what putting out two live records at the same time is doing for Temple Fang, in terms of further (because this isn’t their first time at the live-record dance, as noted) showcasing for listeners the different aspects of their personality that might come out on a given night or in a given situation.
If you’ve got a fest set that’s 40 minutes and a headlining date that’s 90-plus, those situations will each require something different from the other. Temple Fang take on both tasks with grace and openness, and the recordings by Julian “Jonko” Deckert (in the case of Sonic Whip, also Nico van Montfort, Gonny Maas and Petra Randewijk) showcase this with clarity of purpose and execution. There’s never mistaking at any point what band you’re listening to — for sure it’s Temple Fang — but the breadth of what that means is still expanding, and that is due to the purposeful creative drive on the part of the band.
As regards the basic listening experiences, it’s also worth noting that Sonic Whip took place months before the dB’s show, and that time difference can be heard in how Temple Fang dwell in the material. Of course, Live at dB’s has more songs, so there’s that, but the most drastic direct example is in “Once,” which gained nine minutes from one gig to the other, most of which is given to expansions on the song’s jammier explorations. They have more time to spend, and they spend it in a slower, more gradual unfurling, and while de Groot‘s vocals remain tense in the verse, that’s part of his style, as “Harvest Angel” shows just before.
Practically an LP on its own, “Once” becomes an inevitable focal point for anyone taking on these two releases, and its payoff is both in the volume-swell later and in the journey that surrounds, which is broad enough to make the subsequent closer “Josephine” feel straightforward at ‘just’ 17 minutes. Some of it is jamming, but that’s not cordoned off, as in “here’s the verse, here’s the jam, here’s the next verse.” It’s more like parts are fleshed out, lived in, and so expanded. I don’t know that it is, but if the take on “Once” is what convinced the band Live at dB’s needed to come out, they’d be well justified.
Since their outset, Temple Fang have been attentive to limited live albums like these, capturing the band on two nights in different situations that show not only their range but their ability to emphasize different facets and sides of their approach, sometimes with the same songs. If Live at Sonic Whip feels like the band getting down to business and comes across as a brief sampling of what they can do, that relative forwardness complements Live at dB’s, which obviously is a deeper dive on all sides. Either way you go — and here I’ll remind you that you don’t have to choose just one — the only conclusion I’ve been able to draw is “holy crap this is a special band.” It makes me glad to be a Temple Fang fan.
