Tame Impala, The Slow Rush
Fiction Records
Tame Impala: an act that’s a titan of rock, a titan of psychedelia, a titan of the whole music industry. And their latest offering, five-years-in-the-making The Slow Rush, is suitably massive. For something so huge, it would be easy for Kevin Parker (the genius behind the bandname) to stick with the stadium-sized rock stencils he knows, the pounding insistence of Elephant or the keening anthemicness of Let It Happen, but not only is TSR immense but it’s also immensely exploratory – Parker takes us on a musical circuit of everything that’s interested him in the last five years, it feels almost like watching a master in the midst of work rather than a finished, set-aside piece, and that’s what makes it so impressive.
Most of the songs sit comfortably above the five-minute mark – Parker hasn’t attempted to condense his sonic meandering into anything close to bite-size, and each song weaves around its ‘idea’, developing and stripping it back in tidal waves. Parker’s experimentation with dragging out motifs through expansive tracks means the album plays with ideas of paralysis and ephemerality all at once. Instruments and sounds pop up for fleeting seconds of punctuation never to be seen again, whilst refrains and beats recur and saturate the tracks, making sure your mind can’t wander too much.
Tame Impala have definitely edged into a dancier, more disco-esque sound on The Slow Rush; constant pulsing, jaunty synth chords and electronic beats the likes of which we’ve heard on previous release Borderline run through the whole album, On Track meanders through an electro-bop dreamscape combining ‘real’ instruments with layers that swell and reverberate around the track. But far from digressing from their rock-band status and sound, Tame Impala seem to have dragged genre with them – stunning basslines never falter for a second, even on their most dance-y tracks. Posthumous Forgiveness is an epic of melancholy, showcasing everything Tame do excellently – there’s rock psych, there’s dance psych, there’s moments where it sounds like Parker is just a particularly prodigious Garageband user that collapses into a gargantuan exhibition of the talent of someone absolutely used to commanding the size crowds that Tame Impala do constantly.
Tame Impala have long been hailed for their formidable basslines and ethereal melodies, but the lowest and highest register are only the bookends for an album that seems to writhe internally. The most fascinating moments take place inside the music – Tomorrow’s Dust features something that somehow sounds like a zip, One More Year’s titular refrain staggers around in the undertones, a choral juddering that doesn’t underpin the track, more inner-pins it, Breathe Deeper’s piano line leaps out at you before sinking back into the mix alongside twinkling and sliding. Parker constantly has you looking in two directions at once, every track is packed with a myriad of secrets, more of which are revealed in every listen.
The album’s sonic density is prime contributor to how atmospheric the whole thing is – Tame Impala have long been hailed as incredible at creating stunning, holographic soundscapes, and The Slow Rush provides the best yet. Picture being underwater, and looking at sunlight rippling towards you – that’s the sound of the house-ish Glimmer, that literally does what its name says. One More Hour, the album’s grand conclusion, revs towards you, you spend the whole track anticipating chords that explode like supernovas. On Track takes you on a wander through a pulsing, floating dream world. There are moments that feel a little lifeless throughout the album (especially when almost every track is hitting five minutes, not every beat can be a showstopper), but we can’t fault Parker for luxuriously drawing out the magic he’s creating – the empty moments let the full moments seem fuller, and there’s certainly no shortage of full moments.
At its most basic, The Slow Rush is the quintessential Tame Impala album: ethereal, saturated with technicality that becomes magic. But there’s no world in which we can simply appreciate TSR for what it is at its most basic, because at its best, it’s an hour long wonder-tour of a realm that Kevin Parker has spent half a decade creating, and it’s a journey we should feel privileged to be on.
The Slow Rush is out tomorrow via Fiction Records.
