Though it hasn't quite reached the level of recognition achieved by histrionic Aussie blooze-rawkers Wolfmother, Perth's Tame Impala seems poised to deliver its lush, tuneful brand of psychedelia to a global audience. Led by guitarist, singer, and songwriter Kevin Parker, the band shared some common ground with Wolfmother's epic riff stomp on its debut 2008 EP, occasionally hinting at what Cream might have sounded if George Harrison ditched The Beatles to join Clapton and company.
By the time Parker put the finishing touches Tame Impala's first full-length album Innerspeaker two years later, the band's sound had evolved into a far subtler creature. With elements of shimmering dream-pop and hypnotic drone helping put a modern twist to Parker's mind-expanding vision, Innerspeaker earned its place on plenty of year-end Best Of lists. The band's meticulously layered sound also made Tame Impala a live favorite with a string of sold-out headlining shows and a celebrated appearance at Coachella last year.
Parker and the newly expanded five-piece line-up of Tame Impala return to the Bay Area this weekend, playing Outside Lands at 1:50 p.m. Saturday afternoon on the festival's main Lands End stage. All Shook Down caught up the guitarist last week shortly after he arrived in the U.S. for several North American dates, including an appearance at Lollapalooza in Chicago, to discuss Tame Impala's forthcoming new album, Lonerism, (out October 9 on Modular Records), playing festivals, and San Francisco's psychedelic heritage.
It seems kind of unusual that the first thing you're doing when you come to the States for these festival shows is a one-off with The Black Keys in Iowa of all places. How did that come together?
Well, they asked us actually. We'd played with them before once or twice. They played in Perth once and we supported them. And we played Coachella with them. So we've met them a few times. They liked the band and asked us if we wanted to do it, and we were coming anyway for these festivals. And we always love being a support act, because it gives us a chance to relax and not be the main focus; to just kind of get up there and have fun and experiment and not feel the pressure of everything going on around you.
You've added a touring member to the live band. Was the show at Splendour in the Grass last weekend the first public performance with this line-up?
That's right. We came out guns blazing [laughs]...
I found a recording posted on the Tame Impala fan Tumblr and it sounds great. The additional keys give you an even fuller sound that's getting into Flaming Lips territory. The cover of "International Feel" by Todd Rundgren provided a real "holy shit!" moment for me. I was listening and thinking it was familiar, then it hit me exactly what it was. Your version was dead on.
It took us a long time to nail that one in practice. It's actually a really complicated song musically. We've always completely frothed over that song.
That whole album is just bananas.
Yeah, for sure. And we could never understand why no one has heard of it, so this is us trying to expose the greatness of A Wizard/ A True Star to everyone.
Will you be including any other surprises like that on this tour?
That one of the only extracurricular songs we do in the set, just because it flows nicely from the song before it, which is "Lucidity." It's kind of just a fun thing to stick on the end and finish the song with a blow out, you know what I mean? To finish the song epically [laughs].
How do Australian festivals like Splendour in the Grass and Big Day Out compare to the American counterparts like Coachella that you've played?
The audiences in Australia know our songs a bit better, because we've been playing around there for longer. The only real difference is people kind of collapse a bit more there [laughs]. I mean, American audiences still get into it, but for some reason, the Aussie audiences have more of a kinship with us; like we belong to them a little bit more. There's that home blood relationship. Maybe that's just how I feel.
To get into your new material, of the two songs I've heard, "Elephant" seems closer to earlier, riff-centered songs from your EP and demos. "Apocalypse Dreams" leans more towards the dreaminess of Innerspeaker. Would you say the balance of Lonerism lies somewhere between those two sounds, or does the album go somewhere else altogether?
I think "Elephant" is probably an anomaly on that album. There are no other songs that have that bluesy riffing. That's kind of why we put out "Apocalypse Dreams" before "Elephant," because we didn't really want the first thing to come out to be too misleading. The rest of the album is pretty psychedelic, with melancholy melodies and sounds. I guess it's a lot more like "Apocalypse Dreams." But at the same time, "Apocalypse Dreams" is pretty different as well.
One thing the two songs have in common is more prominent use of keyboards. Does that run through the whole album?
Yeah. The album is pretty sparse on the guitars. I mean, there are guitars on almost every song, though some songs have no guitars at all. I think on this album, we used the guitars more as this thing that suddenly comes in. It's like, "Oh shit! There's a guitar now!" On "Apocalypse Dreams," I think the first guitar comes in at the third minute or something. There's no guitar until then, which was definitely an experiment with this album. To try to make pretty rich psychedelic music without relying on guitars, you know what I mean?
Did you write more using keyboards than you have in the past?
Well I'm still not as good at keyboard as I am at guitar. It's still easier for me to write a song on guitar. But usually the actual writing bit is done without any instruments at all. It kind of just pops into my head and I have to sort of use whatever instrument I can to get it out. By the time it comes to recording it, it can really be a keyboard or a guitar [song]. There's not a really stark line between the two. It's more whatever kind of texture you want to get. I guess to answer simply, I was using keyboards in the songwriting process a lot more. But sounds are always pretty interchangeable.
Did you record the new album in the way you did Innerspeaker, with you working largely on your own?
I guess in a way. Two of the songs on this new album are co-written with Jay [Watson, who plays drums, guitar and synths in Tame Impala], whereas on the last album it was pretty much all written by me. But this one is mostly the same thing. Most of the songs are written by me, with me layering the instruments on it in the studio except for the songs with Jay. This album for me was all about expanding and allowing more things to get through the filter. And I guess outside songwriting was one of those things. I've always respected Jay immensely as a songwriter.
Lyrically, "Elephant" seems like an ode to a swaggering, blustery kind of douchebag. Maybe the equivalent for you would be a lager lout? Is that an accurate assessment?
I think lager lout is more of a British thing. But yeah, that's totally accurate. It's about that kind of jock, bully full-of-himself guy who is secretly deeply insecure and fragile. It's from the perspective of someone who totally hates him and despises his character.
It seems any modern psych band, even if they don't have a direct musical debt, at least has a spiritual debt to the first wave of '60s psychedelic bands that came out of San Francisco. I can hear some Blue Cheer in earlier Tame Impala, but was wondering if there's anybody in particular from here that came from that era that has been an inspiration?
I guess Jefferson Airplane. They're from San Francisco, right? They were one of my first loves of '60s psych. There are probably a million bands that I love, but for the life of me I can't think of which ones are from San Fran and which ones aren't [laughs]. I used to be a lot more into the '60s psych scene than I am now. I was into the sounds and the grooves and the sound before the cultural stuff and everything else. It was interesting, but I wouldn't say it was the scene or the culture that inspires my music.
Psych is one of those styles of music in S.F. that always seems to have these resurgences over time. Have you encountered any of the current crop of local psych acts like Wooden Shjips and Ty Segall?
Yeah, totally. We're big Wooden Shjips fans. And I know the guys love Ty Segall. I haven't heard a lot of his stuff, but if I can speak for the rest of the guys, big props to him. Deerhoof is another one. It's good to see that it's still keeping on. It would be sad if it was to peter out. It just shows that if there's something in the water, there's something in the water and it stays around forever.
For a guitar-centric psych band, Tame Impala has always had an element of electronic music, whether in your covers of Massive Attack's "Angel" and BlueBoy's "Remember Me," the remixes you've commissioned for single releases, or the way you use effects within song structure like the heavy flange in the turnaround of "Elephant." How much of an impact has that kind of music had on your songwriting?
A lot, I think. Because if you use guitars the way just the way guitars want to be used, it's just going to sound like guitar music, you know? For me, the way to use guitars is to try and make it sound as far away from a guitar as possible while still having the same passion in the playing and the same kind of expression. To me, the whole electronic element coming into the music gives it that extra visceral, brain-squelching quality. With rock music, the most you can ever do is rock someone's face off. When you incorporate weird sounds and textures, it can take it to another level. It can take it to another world.
A lot of your earlier songs and demos can be found with a little searching on the internet. Have you thought about putting some of that early material out on a proper release?
I'd love to do something like that, but at the same time, I guess it kind of makes it a more fun thing for people to just suss it out and discover it one day. I guess it would be cool if you could pick it up in a record store. Yeah, I'd love to do something like that one day, but it's always hard to look that far back when there's something happening now. If it ever slows down one day, we'll start digging up the past.
I've only become acquainted with your associated band Pond in the past year, but I missed the show in SF. The band has some musical similarities with Tame Impala, but seems more of a freewheeling collective. How do the bands differ as far as how they write and record?
Well, it's completely different in the process. They're my friends who I live with and hang out with all the time. The music is going to be similar that way because we have the same tastes and listen to the same things. These two bands are just two pieces of the puzzle that we sort of make as a bunch of friends in Perth. We have a lot of friends who we make music with and we have a lot of overlapping members.
It's a really incestuous bunch, a really small community of weird experimental musicians. Tame Impala and Pond are just two parts of that. There's a lot more. It just hasn't really surfaced yet. Well, it's surfaced in Perth [laughs]. With Tame Impala, it's a pretty solo affair. We have these other bands that we do as collectives where we all write music for it. It's just good to have one, for me, that's just my own expression. There's no outside opinion and I don't have to please the taste of anyone else. I can just do what I want. Pond is kind of the other method of making music, just really having fun and collaborating.
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