Transcendence<\/a> in its squirrelly tunefulness, but not enough to pull me in at the time. That said, when someone who\u2019s been close to you for decades keeps recommending an album to you, a full listen is required at some point, both because it\u2019s the right thing to do and because first impressions are notoriously inaccurate.<\/p>\nAfter three or four complete circuits through Lonerism<\/i> I can now report with confidence that, well\u2026 it\u2019s odd.<\/p>\n
Tame Impala is the moniker of one-man band Kevin Parker, who makes every noise on the album other than the piano and keys played by Jay Watson on the two tracks he co-wrote with Parker (\u201cApocalypse Dreams\u201d and \u201cElephant,\u201d two of the stronger and more focused numbers on the album). Parker\u2019s mad-scientist-locked-in-the-studio approach results in intricate yet consistently off-kilter tracks full of strange tones, slowed down or sped up rhythm sections, and serial sonic left turns, topped by echo-drenched lead vocals that reek of 1972 (for this writer, a compliment). As others have suggested, Parker\u2019s sound owes debts to Todd Rundgren and Pink Floyd, though in the end he doesn\u2019t sound much like either.<\/p>\n
What Lonerism<\/i> in fact sounds a little bit like\u2014ah-hah, first clue!\u2014is if the Beatles had decided after Sgt. Pepper\u2019s<\/i> to make \u201cLucy In The Sky With Diamonds\u201d their stepping-off point for everything that followed. It doesn\u2019t hurt\u2014ah-hah, another clue!\u2014that Parker\u2019s vocals sound eerily like White Album<\/i>-era John Lennon at times; in fact, it sometimes feels like the weirder a track gets, the more obvious the resemblance.<\/p>\n
And these songs are plenty weird. <\/p>\n
The lyrics are a series of surreal vignettes about either alienation, or romantic longing, or both at once within the confines of a crumbling relationship. So, cheery stuff. That sense of existential dread is only heightened by the otherworldly strangeness of the arrangements, in which every instrument\u2014guitar, bass, drums, and synths\u2014feels as if it\u2019s been twisted and distorted like sonic taffy. (And indeed, the album was mixed with typical flair by Dave Fridmann of Flaming Lips fame.)<\/p>\n
But what does it sound like, you ask? Everything and nothing you\u2019ve ever heard, all at once. On opener \u201cBe Above It,\u201d the hypnotic, double-time jackhammer drums (real acoustic ones just like the gods of music intended) and out-of-breath vocals suggest a man in a footrace with his own sanity. Second track \u201cEnders Toi\u201d features an alternately dreamy and muscular synth line snaking up and down and in circles around the rhythmic nucleus of the song. Then \u201cApocalypse Dreams\u201d and \u201cMind Mischief\u201d come along to firmly establish Parker\u2019s Beatles fetish, sounding like nothing so much as an Abbey Road<\/i> homage created in the dark, on acid. My notes from this part of the listen include: \u201cIf light shining through a kaleidoscope made noise, it might sound a little like this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Onward. \u201cMusic To Walk Home By\u201d shambles along riding a bright melody until a repeating guitar riff ascends out of the sonic whirlpool; it\u2019s just the sort of intriguing dynamics that are Parker\u2019s specialty. The middle section of the album is a blurry haze of songs about things crumbling around our narrator, culminating in the especially trippy, Floyd-adjacent layers of psychedelic texture that constitute the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth minutes of \u201cKeep On Lying.\u201d<\/p>\n
The aforementioned \u201cElephant\u201d feels like a surrealist ELO number\u2014Jeff Lynne being the world\u2019s biggest Beatles fan\u2014a tune with groove and atmosphere to spare, even if the lyric feels even more detached from reality than usual. Then \u201cShe Just Won\u2019t Believe Me\u201d lasts 57 seconds, two lines and a half-dozen synth chords\u2014okayyy. The elaborately titled \u201cNothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control\u201d presents a bout of particularly inspired and tuneful oddness, including the part where the song starts over at around 5:20. Closer \u201cSun\u2019s Coming Up\u201d indeed feels like the first light of morning after an apocalyptic night, just Parker and his plaintive piano. \u201cI\u2019ll disconnect completely, see how that works out\u201d he sings, and then at 2:45 in the song has a nervous breakdown and shifts to a symphony of flanged-out, distorted electric guitar chords for the last 2:30.<\/p>\n
After a while enveloped in this stuff, you\u2019re left trying to remember what normal music sounds like, because Lonerism<\/i> constructs an alternate universe where the rules of gravity and physics no longer apply. I\u2019m all for originality and experimentation, but honestly, too much of this feels less like an avant-garde approach to constructing a song than just plain old fucking around. And yet, there\u2019s no denying the moments of sublime melodic beauty that surface from time to time.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to admire Lonerism<\/i>\u2019s inventiveness, and in its limited way, it\u2019s brilliant, a fully realized musical vision around the theme of alienation. My main issue with it may be as much with that theme as with its execution; Lonerism<\/i> does not emotionally connect, which may be exactly Parker\u2019s intention. The problem for this member of the audience is that the primary reason I listen to music is for that sense of emotional connection. For all Tame Impala\u2019s cleverness and originality, I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ll ever feel the need to listen to this album again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":31186,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8973],"rating":[5615],"class_list":["post-46209","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-tame-impala","rating-rating-b"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46209"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}