At the Biltmore on Saturday, May 23

You wouldn't expect a psychedelic rock band to discourage its fans from indulging in psychotropic drugs, but Temples singer-guitarist James Bagshaw took a moment during Saturday night's show at the Biltmore to do just that. Before the group from Leeds had even finished its opening number—the awesome title track from Temples' equally awesome 2014 debut album, Sun Structures—Bagshaw announced, "Whoever's smoking weed, fuckin' cut it out. Save it for after the show."

It might have been some oblique reference to Roger Daltrey, who had a few nights earlier threatened to stop a Long Island Who concert if some punter in the crowd didn't stub out his joint. But then Bagshaw reiterated his admonition right before Temples played a new song (which the Internet would have me believe is called "Volcano/Saviour"). He said the marijuana smoke interfered with his ability to sing properly, but drummer Samuel Toms undercut the frontman's pleas, telling the packed Biltmore, "Don't listen to him. Smoke as much as you want."

If a whiff of weed smoke messed Bagshaw up, it wasn't in any obvious way. Temples made a strong case that its sound is simply too big to be contained in a room the size of the Biltmore. It's not that Bagshaw, Toms, guitarist-keyboardist Adam Smith, and drummer Thomas Walmsley played loudly—their volume was perfect, in fact—it's that their expansive sound would be better suited to a mid-sized theatre (at least) than to a small club with terrible sight lines. Back in the U.K., Sun Structures was a top-10 album and Temples headlines venues like London's 2,300-seat Forum, which seems about right.

Temples writes songs that, though they rely heavily on aping sounds first employed by the likes of Pink Floyd, the Byrds, and the Beatles, are well-crafted and accessible. And the band play those songs remarkably well, which made for a pretty thrilling live experience when it tore into the stoner-rock riffage of "A Question Isn't Answered", which took on a primally heavy dimension that the recorded version only hinted at. Equally epic was the snake-charmer rock of "Sand Dance", which, while arguably a rewrite of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir", is at least a damn good one, achieving in six-and-a-half minutes what the Tea Party couldn't manage in 20 years. Conversely, "Keep in the Dark" was pure glitter-bombed glam rock, which made sense of Bagshaw's impossibly luxurious Marc Bolan hairstyle.

Temples ended its set with "Mesmerise". Extended to about twice its album length, the song closed with a steadily propulsive motorik beat, over which Bagshaw and Smith wrought the sorts of sounds that Neu! was exploring around the time of its second LP. Pushing things into krautrock territory might seem like a bit of a stretch for a psych-pop act, but Neu! 2 came out in 1973, so that's well within Temples' well-defined aesthetic sphere.

After that came a somewhat anticlimactic one-song encore of "Shelter Song", after which Bagshaw and company presumably retired to the green room to pass around a gold-plated hookah filled with only the finest BC Arctic Sun. After all, his singing was done for the night.