Album Review: Templeton Pek: Watching The World Come Undone

Celebrating their ten year anniversary as a signed band, Birmingham, UK based punk outfit Templeton Pek have released their fifth studio album, Watching The World Come Undone, today, February 23rd, via Drakkar Records. The band started the writing process long before the Brexit vote and before Trump came to power, but they could sense that there was impending chaos on the horizon, as a result Watching The World Come Undone draws from the internal struggles as humans and those external struggles, politics, the environment and cultural shifts, that have recently come to the fore for all the wrong reasons.

 

Nowhere To Hide comes straight out of the traps with high octane number that borders on melodic hardcore, whilst the following number, Oblivious, brings the pace down but without sacrificing any of the intensity. The Awakening puts it’s foot back firmly on the gas and it pretty much stays there for the rest of the album, many of the songs on Watching The World Come Undone are marked by breakdowns, but these just act as a springboard which the tracks use to launch themselves back into life. After over a decade together Templeton Pek have produced a contemporary album of punk rock that’s one of that rare breed that will effortlessly satisfy the appetites of fans from many genres, from punk through rock and into alternative rock.

 

There are comparisons to Rise Against, Ignite and the early recordings by The Offspring in the delivery, but for me there is a distinctly British quality to the album that aligns them more to the likes of the much missed Three Colours Red with their perfectly pitched mix of punk and rock influences. After ten years of recording albums, and thirteen years together, it’s a tribute to Templeton Pek that they’ve recorded an album as passionate and intense as Watching The World Come Undone, and it makes them a band I’ll be endeavouring to catch when they play the Rebellion Festival this summer

 

Watching The World Come Undone can be ordered on all formats here

 

Templeton Pek‘s Facebook page can be found here