Parker made his name with bold, fuzzed-out guitar riffs, but virtually the only time a guitar appears on Currents, midway through the instrumental track Gossip, it sounds thin and trebly, listless and shattered, which seems in keeping with the album’s overall tone. His biggest hit to date is Elephant, a track that stomped crowd-pleasingly along on a bover-booted glitter beat: when the same rhythm appears on The Moment, all its macho swagger is recast as a flighty, delicate skip, supporting a beautifully sugary pop tune. In fact, moments on the album seem like Parker is playing against type. It’s possible to detect a prickly defiance in the title of another of the tracks on Currents, Yes, I’m Changing. Cue further dismay from fans in the YouTube comments section. You would have called it a pop song, had it not swiftly abandoned all pretence of standard verse-chorus structure and spent eight minutes twisting and turning in odd directions: into extended instrumental breaks and sections of hypnotic drone, into Beach Boysesque harmonies filtered through Auto-Tune and what sounded remarkably like that reliable guarantor of daytime radio play, a bass solo. It seemed to take its cues not from Tomorrow Never Knows but the filtered house music of Daft Punk and the hazy, etiolated R&B of the Weeknd, along with the kind of early 80s album on which super-smooth pop-rock warped into something far weirder and started evoking an eerie, small-hours desolation beneath the gloss. Then he announced the imminent arrival of Tame Impala’s third album by releasing Let It Happen, a song that sounded almost nothing like their last two albums. First, he co-wrote and lent his voice to three tracks on Mark Ronson’s Uptown Special album, in the process causing a degree of uproar among the let’s get a petition up about Kanye West section of Tame Impala’s fanbase. Thus far, he seems to have spent 2015 moving even further off-piste. It served notice that Parker wasn’t interested in revivalism or sticking to a script. The result was a very 21st-century album. Lonerism, in 2012, wasn’t above dropping the odd reference to the Beatles or the Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, but the songs came draped in modern electronics and slathered in distortion – not the warm, familiar fuzz of overdriven amps, but an alien, digital noise, the sound of modern machines going wrong. Of all the music by the current crop of psychedelically inclined artists, Tame Impala’s albums have been the least slavishly indebted to the 60s. It’s a point that Kevin Parker seems to implicitly understand. One reason those albums are great is because they were made without an instruction manual: they were the work of people crashing through the usual boundaries and venturing into the unknown.
Tame impala let it happen chords manuals#
You can see why – who wouldn’t be seduced by the sound of rock music at its most inventive? – but the big problem with a lot of latterday psychedelia is its tendency to treat Revolver or Forever Changes or The Piper at the Gates of Dawn as set texts, musical instruction manuals to be followed to the letter, which rather misses the point. At any point since the early 80s, you could expect to find someone doing something audibly in thrall to the soundtrack of the summer of love: from Temples to Toy, there’s certainly a lot of it about at the moment. There’s another volume to be written about psychedelia’s curious afterlife: the fact that a genre assumed to be a fad, inexorably linked with a moment in time and a fleeting burst of druggy utopianism, turned out to be anything but. But it ends around 1971, as psychedelia calcified into prog and the pop artists who’d sung of their minds growing up to the sky on Top of the Pops found themselves back on the cabaret circuit. The work of the academic Rob Chapman, it is a fantastic, exhaustive history of the genre: comprehensive but gripping, packed with eye-opening period detail and with a brilliant analysis of everything from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the oeuvre of the Crocheted Doughnut Ring. I n a few weeks’ time, the book Psychedelia and Other Colours is due to be published.
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