Tame Impala hails from Perth, Australia, which might be the most geographically isolated city in the world. And when I finally had the chance to speak with frontman Kevin Parker, he'd just returned from going off the grid as he does "when it all gets too much." Parker's a hard man to pin down.
Having just put out its third album, Currents, only three weeks ago, Tame Impala has consolidated its position as psychedelic rock's standard bearer. (Writing in these pages in 2012, Dave Pehling called Parker an "audio hallucination conjurer.") But Parker doesn't think of what he does as psychedelic rock, noting that people seem to hold wildly different opinions of how Tame Impala fits in at festivals like Outside Lands.
"I guess if people say it is [psychedelic], then it is," Parker says. "We're the kind of band that comes on and everyone chills out a bit. Then I've heard other people say our music is that terrible term 'festival-ready.' Surely there's a deeper pursuit to music than getting bros to pump their fists in the air."
Early in its career, Tame Impala was averse to the contrived surprise of encores, and the band's approach to audience expectations is shot through with mischief. When played live, "Elephant" — possibly T.I.'s best-known song — morphs from a tight, three-and-a-half-minute track into a meandering sonic odyssey. Is Parker deliberately messing with people's heads?
"I think that was something that kind of grew," Parker says, "because there's that drum fill right at the end of the song [that] grew into this weird little drum solo that went into a jazz beat that grew into its own section, and before you knew it, we had a three-minute jazz opus. In the end, I really don't know why. There was no real intention to fuck with people."
This is all part of the pattern of downplaying T.I.'s reception. Although the similarity between Parker's voice and John Lennon's is undeniable, when I interviewed Parker at Bonnaroo in 2013, he claimed he'd barely ever listened to the Beatles growing up. He was unable to name more than four songs on any one Beatles album, he said.
"I don't really hear the Beatles when I listen to my own music," Parker told me then. And while he didn't deny sounding like Lennon, he insisted it's something "which I don't intend to do."
If this conspires to make Parker sound prickly or obstinate, that's not the case. His refusals are more like self-deprecating demurrals, and he laughs a lot. (How can he not? It's good to be a critical darling.)
Referring to 2012's Lonerism, Parker says, "When the last album came out, I honestly didn't think people would think that was psychedelic. I was just trying to make music that moves people, that satisfies that urge in me. Same with this album, I was pretty confident that people wouldn't call this album psychedelic, either. I was surprised! It's like, 'Psych Rock Album of the Year'? Really, is there nothing else out there more psychedelic?"
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