The fact that it's possible to decipher what Parker's on about (granted, direct song titles such as "Yes, I'm Changing", a disarmingly pretty slice of downer yacht-disco that hovers tantalisingly between the cheeseboard and the dance floor, help a bit) without overdue straining of concentration skills is in itself a sign of how much has changed. Even then, it's relegated to the lowly status of an extra, creeping in the background amongst the starring cast of electronics "Elephant" this isn't.Īppropriately, the song - and, by and large, Currents as a whole - is about accepting and embracing change there are various references to new me's emerging, letting go of the tried and tested, and doldrums of the recent past being buried at the bottom of a bin. Over six minutes of "Let It Happen" have passed before the first sighting of a guitar. This time around, the less glitzy bits of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories might be a more apt point of comparison. In the past, Tame Impala has resided in the neighbourhood of Sweden's cruelly underrated bucolic psych warriors Dungen, whose leader Gustav Ejstes shares Parker's love for musty vinyl, guitar-led stretching out, loose-limbed but loud drumming and cutting-edge hip hop production techniques. A pulsating, day-glo orgy of fluttering synths, robotically pulsating rhythms and ever-ascending falsetto sighs, held together by a heavenly melody and a proggily sprawling yet still tightly orchestrated coda that translates jam band aesthetics for a bank of keyboards over the course of almost eight minutes, the transformation from the unabashedly retro fretboard-milking of 2012's near-universally hailed Lonerism to the cosmically vibrating sad-disco spaceship Currents sails on is so total you'd half-expect Parker had been dragged, kicking and screaming, to the same musical re-education camp Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson must have served in prior to this year's funked-up Multi-Love (a decent comparison to what's on offer here). Although the turbulent drumming and limber bass lines sound reassuringly familiar, it only takes a few bars of opener "Let It Happen" to figure out that Kevin Parker - the guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer who crafts Tame Impala's recorded output on his lonesome in his home studio in Fremantle, West Australia - hasn't quite bought into the ethos of not rocking the boat.
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