Kevin Parker makes the music he wants to make, and a growing audience has been there with him at every turn. While he has co-produced a number of respectable Chart Pop collaborations with other acts, Tame Impala albums are beholden to little but his own interests. So far Kevin Parker has fit the bill of a restless creative mind. Tame Impala sits on the precipice of immortality and oblivion. This means that the prospect of a new release often sets an artist teetering on the edge of praise and condemnation. Fans become resistant to change, while the acts they fall in love with remain driven by restless creative impulse and their own musical fascinations. Once they have, any change can make them uncomfortable or even terrified. And when they do, they want to hold onto them. People, music fans especially, tend to get attached to things. Taking too far of a leap is a perilous business. See the band perform to an arena crowd it’s obvious the majority watching have no patience for the new material. (Particularly in the United States where the band had been struggling for years to breakthrough.) Tranquillity performed well enough in a commercial sense but compared to AM before it, it stiffed. The Arctic Monkeys are a recent example of a group whose Doors-meets- Pet Sounds excursion of Tranquillity Base Hotel and Casino damaged the hardwon approval secured with the meat and potatoes rock of previous album AM. This may not be what draws people to an act like Tame Impala, a good hook and memorable chorus will do that job easily enough, but it’s what keeps them there. Kevin Parker is his own master and if he can be said to be given over to any governing maxim it’s the same one as the Beatles had: “ Never do the same thing twice.” Tame Impala leads its audience, not the other way around. Even the members of his own band claim to be in the dark as to what his new albums will sound like until they too are presented with the finished product. While Parker courts a mass audience he doesn’t work with the producers or songwriters’ other artists in the pop sphere use to ensure success. This would be a safe enough exercise were Kevin Parker a Play It By The Numbers kind of guy. To take the music outside of the cult of cool and critical acclaim – which Parker already seems to be letting go of with second Slow Rush single ‘ It Might Be Time’ when he sings “ you ain’t as cool as you used to be” – and establish Tame Impala as an institution unto itself. The Slow Rush is an opportunity to transcend it. But the true measure of an album is not how much music industry artillery it gathers behind it but whether those who already know the band will accept it and whether it can win the ears of a new generation of fans.Ĭurrents was the transition from indie to pop, both musically and in terms of audience. No doubt it will enjoy more record company promotion, more radio airplay and more hype than any other Tame Impala release.
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With Tame Impala now a known quantity, The Slow Rush is poised to reach further still. What those who object when Currents trumps Lonerism and InnerSpeaker in these Best of Decade Lists fail to grasp is the scale on which the album succeeded. The fact third album Currents made so many recent Best Albums of the Decade lists attests to the fact that a wider audience has come to recognize what many Tame Impala’s fans have known for close to a decade now. Parker’s ability to put himself across in song came even closer to the fore with Lonerism before being sweetened for a mass audience Currents. Under the surface of InnerSpeaker’s lysergic guitar lines lies the passion, subtlety and honest emotion of a remarkable songwriter. Having said all this the essential element of what makes his music potent has been there from album one. As his profile has grown, so too has Kevin Parker’s ambition, skill as a musician and ability as a performer.
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Tame Impala is a project that has grown with its listeners. What value is there in making a claim like this? Well, put it this way.
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And with three singles to go by, the concern is not that The Slow Rush will a bad. With every album, Kevin Parker has pushed himself to another level of fame, success and critical adulation.Ĭan he claim the victory of a fourth? The album in question, the recently announced The Slow Rush, has been completed and its arrival date confirmed. So far, each has been a remarkable contrast to what has come before, each has been as different as it has new. Even the Beatles and the Rolling Stones never managed more than one truly memorable run of incredible records. Graphic by Cris Ruiz be an artist and release four albums, each as amazing as the last is a rare thing.