FEATURE:
The Moment
Tame Impala’s Current at Ten
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ONE of the best…
IN THIS PHOTO: Tame Impala in 2013/PHOTO CREDIT: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images
albums of the 2010s turns ten on 17th July. Tame Impala’s third studio album, Currents, was released on 17th July, 2015. I wanted to look ahead to that anniversary and explore Currents. The live band is led by Kevin Parker. Parker produces and writes alone in the studio. Many consider Currents to be the best Tame Impala album to date. I am going to end with a couple of reviews of the album. Before getting there, I want to bring in a couple of interviews with Tame Impala. SPIN spoke with him in July 2015 around the release of Currents. One of the best albums of that year, it is still discussed today. I am not sure if there are any tenth anniversary plans:
“Not too bad,” Parker says, when asked how he’s feeling. “Not too good, either.” That noncommittal answer, broken up by a sigh and a chuckle, is exactly the kind of unassuming sincerity one would expect from a guy who opens his feverishly anticipated new album with an all-will-be-well mantra called “Let It Happen.” The nearly eight-minute “Let It Happen” — with its snapping percussion, fidgety synth transmissions, and symphonic second half — surfaced back in March, kickstarting the hype and promotional cycle for Currents, Tame Impala’s third album and the follow-up to 2012’s lauded Lonerism. Rightly hailed as one of the year’s best songs, the single also reintroduced the project as something far more omnivorous than it had been in the past.
When you were putting Currents together, did you feel extraordinary pressure because Lonerism was so well-received? Or was it the usual kind of anxiety that comes with any new project?
I think the only pressure I felt was the pressure I put on myself — just the pressure to live up to my own expectation of what I wanted the album to be, and because I was treading new territory with this album. It was a suck-it-and-see kind of situation. I was like, “Well, I’m going to go into this and give it my all.” So, I wanted to successfully do something new, and even just have the confidence to go through with it. Because that can happen a lot of the time: You have grand ideas and then you just end up backing out and go with the safe option.
Did you set any specific rules or goals for yourself with the new record?
I think — and this is going to come across as extremely cliché [laughs] — the only rule was to make an attempt to abandon the rules that I’ve set up in the past. [They weren’t] like conscious rules, or anything, but just boundaries that I’d put up for myself.
What kinds of boundaries?
Things like not using drum machines, not using certain effects that in the past I would have considered cheesy or musically taboo — but only from me at my most snobby, musically and intellectually snobby. Because the other part of me — I love all music that makes you feel good. All pop music. Well, not all pop music, I shouldn’t say that.
There are parts of me that would just make instantly gratifying music, and a part of me that is dedicated to making music with depth, something you can sink your teeth into, something that has layers and you can explore the dimensions of. There’s always those two sides battling it out — or getting along, if they want.
Your vocals are much higher up in the mix here than in the past — they’re not buried under as much reverb or effects. What was the impulse behind that? Was it for the sake of doing something different, or did you specifically want people to understand the lyrics on this record?
I put so much time into the lyrics and I feel like I bare my soul a little bit more with each album. With each album, I get more and more proud of my lyrics, of what I’m able to break off of myself and put into a song. And with the last album I was really proud of the lyrics; I wanted people to get the message of each song, but it so happened that I had a million other parts of the mix that I wanted to squeeze in there as well.
I guess I was a little disappointed in myself for how difficult it was to extract meaning from the songs by listening to it — which is why the lyrics were printed in the sleeve. I felt like you could still kind of understand what I was saying. I basically gave them a fighting chance by putting the lyrics in the booklet. And this album, for me, the message of the music is just as strong as the music itself. They’re basically hand-in-hand, whereas in the past, I think I started out making music with vocals just being treated as another instrument.
I am going to come to a fifth anniversary feature from NME. Talking with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker about a hugely important album. One that is influencing artists to this day. I do hope that there are new features and investigations of Currents closer to 17th July:
“Released on July 17, 2015, the 13-track record was a revelation. The trippy fusion of rock, electronica, pop and disco took this once-introverted stoner dude from Perth into a worldwide festival headliner. His previous releases, 2010’s ‘Innerspeaker’ and 2012’s follow-up ‘Lonerism’, are both now considered modern-day psych-rock classics, but ridden with anxiety-ridden, insular listens. ‘Currents’ couldn’t be more different.
Not only is ‘Currents’ Parker’s most-successful and best album to date, but one of the decade’s most influential. It landed Parker his first Number One album in his native Australia, and he turned the heads of Kanye West, Travis Scott, A$AP Rocky and Lady Gaga – all of whom he’s now collaborated with. It’s so good, in fact, that Rihanna closed her 2016 album ‘Anti’ with a cover of cosmic-R&B banger ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’ and changed almost nothing except swapping Parker’s vocals out for her own.
Half a decade on, it remains a spectacular listen and sees Parker fully embracing his love of rave culture and classic pop. Take the ‘70s strut on ‘The Less I Know The Better’, or The Chemical Brothers-indebted ravedelica on ‘Let It Happen’ as proof of his emboldened creativity. Those tracks are complemented by bewitching instrumental interludes (‘Gossip’), sultry slow-jams (‘I’m A Man’), psych-surf-pop (‘Disciples).
When NME calls him to celebrate the fifth anniversary, Kevin Parker in a chipper mood. He’s tinkering with a few projects, and when it comes to corona-induced lockdown he’s mainly a “glass half-full” kinda guy. ‘The Slow Rush’, his fourth album and follow-up to ‘Currents’, was released in February 2020, and he managed to play four live shows before the tour was pulled due to safety concerns around COVID-19. As the world takes a breather, Parker is able to do the same and reflect on his past.
“The longer it’s been since ‘Currents’, the more it becomes an enjoyable and nostalgic experience,” he says. “Five years feels this sweet spot where I can really enjoy it. When I look back at that time, I get a snapshot of who I was, what I was feeling and what I was going through. I can see myself so clearly when I listen to it.”
So who was Kevin Parker when he made that album? He’d been on the road since 2010 in support of his two-released albums, gradually working his way up festival bills and bigger crowds. But the latter’s willingness to dabble with slinky R&B (‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’) and tub-thumping rock (‘Elephant’) spawned support slots with Arctic Monkeys and critical acclaim. NME named his second album, ‘Lonerism’, as its Album of The Year in 2012.
Still, it’s an anxious listen. The sound of an introverted genius who loved the craft of making music, but less so with the world at large being interested. So how did we end up with bombastic party album like ‘Currents’?
“When we started touring, the outside world kind of intimidated me,” he says. That shit just terrified me. The anxieties and self-doubt on ‘Lonerism’ – both thematically and musically – was something inside of me that I just had to get out and with that album I felt like I’d fully flushed that side out of me. With ‘Currents’, I had this burst of confidence. I decided that I wanted to make weird pop music, and I wasn’t afraid to make pop music and stand behind it. I just wanted to make silky disco-pop and anyone who says that they don’t like that kind of music is missing out.”
Parker credits that mindset shift on a few reasons. He says that the perception of pop as “profit-driven” by music snobs had largely been eradicated. “I think people have realised that it’s not that clear cut. Just because someone who makes something that is alternative-sounding or just isn’t pop, doesn’t mean that they are any more intelligent than someone who makes pop”.
I will finish off with a couple of reviews for Currents. Pitchfork noted a jump forward for Kevin Parker as a producer, composer, writer and vocalist, they salute someone with almost superhuman powers who released an album unlike anything else released in 2015. Ten years later and Tame Impala’s third studio album still sounds hugely accomplished and forward-thinking:
“Currents is the result of many structural changes, most of which exchange maximalist, hallucinatory swirl for intricacy, clean lines. As we knew from "Elephant", the song that Parker sheepishly admitted "[paid] for half my house," Parker is good at writing catchy, simple guitar riffs. But he’s also somehow the best and most underrated rock bassist of the 21st century, and it’s not even close on either front. The near total absence of guitars means there is nothing remotely like "Elephant" here. But this allows the bass to serve as every song’s melodic chassis as well as the engine and the wheels: "The Moment" actually shuffles along to the same beat as "Elephant", though it's a schaffel rather than a trunk-swinging plod, its effervescent lope and pearly synths instantly recalling "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" or even Gwen Stefani and Akon's "The Sweet Escape". "The Less I Know the Better" merges Thriller's nocturnal, hard funk with the toxic paranoia of Bad.
And make no mistake, Parker is writing pop songs here, and doing them justice. During the lead-up to Lonerism, he claimed he wrote an entire album of songs for Kylie Minogue and had to stress he wasn't joking. Perhaps appearing on one of 2015's biggest pop records inspired him. Either way, the external or internal pressure to keep his pop impulses at bay are gone.
Nearly every proper song on Currents is a revelatory statement of Parker’s range and increasing expertise as a producer, arranger, songwriter, and vocalist while maintaining the essence of Tame Impala: Parker is just as irreverent working in soul and R&B as he is with psych-rock. "Nangs" and "Gossip" function as production segues, pure displays of "How'd he do that?" synth modulation that prove Parker sees himself as a friendly rival of Jamie xx rather than someone who sees a strict DJ/"musician" binary. While the sitar-like frill on "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" has hints of shimmering Philly soul, there's also engagement with the dubby textures and repetitive melodies of purple R&B. And for good measure, there's a bridge where Parker makes a modern studio take sound like a forgotten, vinyl breakbeat and drops it mid-track like a jarring DJ transition—a trick most effectively used on Yeezus' "On Sight" and "I Am a God".
While Parker will never not sound like John Lennon, this time, he imagines a fascinating alternate history where the most famous Beatle forsakes marriage and the avant-garde for "Soul Train" and Studio 54. On Innerspeaker, Parker's melodies were effectively smudged with reverb and layering—once drawn with charcoal, now they're etched with exacto knives. As a result, the singles on Currents could be covered by anyone, and Parker has advanced to the point where he can write and sing an immaculate choral melody on "'Cause I'm a Man" and have it sound like a soul standard.
"'Cause I'm a Man" also puts Parker's personal life front and center in a new way. The chorus ("I'm a man, woman/ Don't always think before I do") finds him in league with Father John Misty's I Love You, Honeybear and My Morning Jacket's The Waterfall, taking an unsparing and often unflattering look at masculinity and romance, examining what qualifies as biological instinct and what qualifies as mere rationalization for wanting to fuck around and/or be left alone.
The emotional power of Currents comes from its willingness to accept that relationships will expose an introvert's every character defect. Parker's lopsided inventory is revealed on "Eventually", which exposes the false altruism often used to justify "it's not you, it's me." The structure of the chorus ("But I know that I'll be happier/ And I know you will, too/ Eventually") makes it plain that it's always about me first. And even if Parker honestly wishes eventual happiness for "you," he wants it to arrive on his schedule. On "The Less I Know the Better", he calls out an ex's new lover by name and plots his empty revenge (his "Heather" to her "Trevor"). By the next song ("Past Life"), Parker passes her on the street and considers giving her a call not because he cares or wants to get back together, just because he can. He fools himself into thinking a new routine of picking up dry cleaning and walking around the block, which he enumerates in a mumbled, pitched-down monologue, constitutes a new existence, but it's all part of the same continuum”.
I am going to end with a review from The Quietus. Most of the reviews for Currents were (rightly) positive. I don’t think I was too aware of Tame Impala before 2015. Maybe BBC Radio 6 Music introduced me to him/them. Ten years after the third studio album, Tame Impala is still going strong:
“Currents is not, I’d guess, a title simply plucked from the ether. It describes the album just so. It is a series of songs in which you immerse yourself, not to be engulfed and swept headlong this way and that, but to be borne along gently, as if gliding in a giant inner tube on bright sunlit streams fed by a deep and distant well of melancholy. It is sparkling and wistful, and it’s quite lovely.
That, at any rate, is how it feels, which is the first thing, always. The next thing is how it sounds, and why. On Currents, Tame Impala show themselves entirely in command of a recognisable set of sources, and able to fashion them into a something at once familiar yet fresh – in the way that, for instance, LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip have done. (Indeed, it is hard to think of a spirit more kindred to Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, who writes and records as a soloist then tours at the head of a band, than LCD’s James Murphy.)
What may surprise you – it did me – is that this isn’t just an analogy about method. This time, Tame Impala share some of those bands’ sources. Where LCD and Hot Chip stretched back only a little bit further than early 80s synth-pop, Tame Impala have now stretched forward to it – and even taken in new wave on the way, if ‘Disciples’ is anything to go by. On Currents, the percussion in particular owes a great deal to that era, as do the woozy analogue synth sounds. It’s still a record with its roots in the 60s, just one whose creators saw no reason to keep its branches there too. At times, not least at the start of ‘Past Life’ – which then transforms into a monologue about lost love, and the triumph (or perhaps disaster) of hope over experience – I wonder if Parker has been listening to ‘Steve McQueen’ by Prefab Sprout. Perhaps he’s sought to capture that same swirling, dense, emotive prettiness which became inseparable from its wondrous songs.
Everything on Currents evokes something without ever pastiching that thing, or even settling directly upon it. The point of music is never to provide an object lesson in anything – it is to be experienced, heard and felt – but all the same, Currents does provide one, in how to be at once retrospectively inspired and progressively minded. ‘The Less I Know The Better’ is funky disco-rock, but you won’t often hear it so sweetly haunted as here. In ‘The Moment’ you find yourself listening to a Tears For Fears record, and ‘Yes I’m Changing’ might briefly be The Cars. Then the banks of the stream widen, the vista branches outward, and again you’re floating and basking in that uncanny place you simultaneously know and don’t know. The dream that’s not a dream, but certainly isn’t the ordinary world either. There are many ways to effect the psychedelic; this is just one, and a calmer, balmier, more dulcet mode than most of the others. You might say Parker has a talent for shaping bubblegum into beguiling fractals. Sod it, I will say it. He does.
Throughout, Parker treats his high, frail, fluting countertenor as an instrument in itself, which of course it is. He weaves it through the songs as he might do a keyboard or guitar pattern, all phase and effects, an aromatic smoke ring of a voice; with the curious result that it seems to stem directly from the heart, far more than it might were it unadorned and naked”.
On 17th July, the incredible Currents turns ten. One of the finest albums of the 2010s, it charted high in the best of 2015 polls by critics. Some since have included it among the very best albums ever. Ten years after its release, and you can feel its influence on the contemporary music scene. So many new artists influenced heavily by Kevin Parker’s supreme talent. For anyone who has not heard Currents, do go and put it on. It truly is…
A remarkable release.