Passage of time (or lack thereof) is fraught with recyclable exits andĮntrances that are not always aligned with actual minutes and hours. Rushium, the drug, is a fantasy spatiotemporal alterrant that produces the sameĮffect on the brain that music imbibed correctly always has: it stops time. Musicality of all kinds of temporal aberrations, perceived or otherwise. Where other drummers may play to a click, Kevin Parker has carved an industrious career out of drawing time-kept sounds from corners of the mind containing no clocks or metronomes, and there is a particular way that Tame Impala triumphs such as this have served as triage to many, many wistful listeners who may not even question or understand what it makes them feel, but they know it is necessary and good.Īs such, ‘Rushium’ is Tame Impala’s way of expressing the It has always been the soundtrack of diffusivity, or an aural ohm meter for something agelessly maritime and botanical. Tame Impala’s music has always been in need of an orphan drug designation of its own because it has never been housed within a genre that had a true name, or could be said to belong to any identifiable place in time. 2015’s Currents was Parker fully asserting his indefinable difference, slipping his own moorings, and sonically extemporizing his own gestalt therapy, as well as ours too. Lonerism was the dark-visored inflection point of Parker’s career-heart-spirit trajectory in 2012, and everything after has been the fluidization of Tame Impala’s signature transdimensional viscera-made-tympanic style. That is – and there is nothing alla prima in any of it, wily as it may look and
With a laser-like precision – with the exactitude of a really great drummer, What may at first ear-lean appear to be anĪimless acid trip on a Sapphire Coast strand, upon more studied examination,Ĭontains Fibonacci-like beat patterns and under-rhythms that are as tight asīob Ross’ purposely permed head-springs. Master at making you think any given one of his songs is a walk without aĭestination, there are no actual Tame Impala rambles. Sivan to The Sleepy Jackson are everyday characters. Incredibly unique music culture, in which gloriously diverse wonders like Troye Australia’s Perth is pretty much as far awayįrom everything as you can get and still be on a continent that harbors a majorĬosmopolitan city – but Perth is also the oscillating center of its own Parker’s songwriting is reflective of the hybrid Spiky icicles, smell of horses, and always feel slightly illicit, like all Tame Impala songs are precipitous they trail white licorice, display Mourning rings and maniacal laughter, but somehow even the sad ones are neverĭepressing. Writes tunes that are trousseaus and spice ceremonies of both his gamely Moments in his life, and then, by proxy, to those of any close listener. Parker seems to utilize tempo to rewind to the liminal
He tackles timbral timelines in a tactical manner, a rhythmic hacktivist who gets all the way inside the coding of any given beat pattern to rearrange it in such a way that it reflects all of the bubblegum and broken glass of his life experience, but can likewise support big hoops of sound dipped in that silver nitrate of sorts that has been his singular sound-insignia since Tame Impala’s earliest inception. Since 2010’s interstitial Innerspeaker ( QRO review), there has always been something transgenic in what Kevin Parker does with regard to beats and the baseline meanings, and even melodies, that form atop them in his songs. Rhythm is nearly always the foundation of any truly memorable song, but Parker is beautifully alone in likewise making it the go-to starting page of the whole composition process. Writing from the beat forward is not something even many classically trained drummers would have the instinct to do, but Kevin Parker does it as a matter, seemingly, of biological design. Stopping at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena on Tuesday, September 28th, the final night of the first leg of their tour in support of their fourth studio album, The Slow Rush ( QRO review), Tame Impala tapped into their highly original orchestrations of groove and rudiment, teaching A-Town a new psalmody when it comes to the message in the beat. However, when it comes to the poetic cadences and burnished beats of Tame Impala, and their tide-titan creator Kevin Parker, the word “percussion” comes swiftly to mean something far beyond the counting out of right-angled fours. Percussionists are usually with us to serve as the designated keepers of time, their intendment one of principled phrasing and measured meters.