Innerspeaker
Tame Impala
Score:82
Reviewer: Ed Butler
Label: Modular (Australia)
Reviewed: May 27th '10, Released:2010
Psych-rock is something that is so very easy to do badly. After a brief, late 60s heyday, it rapidly morphed into the bloat of mediocre 70s prog and then devolved into a parody of itself. After it was overtaken by an entirely different bloat by 1985, vibrating guitars and acid-flashback were so on the nose that they never really resurfaced until a brave Cornershop resurrected it in 1997 on the excellent and underrated When I Was Born for the 7th Time. Today, the concern is not one of parody, but monotony – there’s so much of it out there, that most of it is merely a substandard rehash of old mores.
Perth’s Tame Impala, however, seem to get it. Notwithstanding the uncanny feeling that they managed to reanimate John Lennon’s corpse to provide lead vocals, they understand that playful effects and woozy atmospheres can only go so far without a solid melody behind them. And on Innerspeaker, there are plenty of those.
Despite the fact that they didn’t include the excellent ‘Sundown Syndrome’ from last year’s A-side, there is still no shortage of songs that perfectly mesh with the oeuvre in which they’re packaged. Lead single ‘Solitude is Bliss’ is a cracker, opening on a killer, woozy riff that the band then spends the rest of the song pulling apart and reassembling. The disconcerting sense this creates on the first listen, which diminishes on subsequent spins, is precisely the kind of unnerving effect that psychedelia is appropriately associated. Opener ‘It’s Not Meant to Be’ is in no rush to get to the main game, bathing the listener in a hazy instrumental for ninety seconds before the vocal melody kicks in.
The band also admirably resist the understandable, but hackneyed urge to close on (or at least include) a 17-minute LSD-fuelled, reverb-drenched psychedelic epic, and it is this that encapsulates the appeal of Innerspeaker. Every second of the album brims with the confidence of a band that feels comfortable on the ground it treads, in command of their skill and their sound, and the result is a treat.
