382. Tame Impala, "Currents"

 


If Tame Impala didn't exist, major music festivals would have to invent them.  They're the perfect late-day act or headliner - just edgy enough for the music snobs and kids, but also easy and unthreatening enough for the dads.  I've seen Tame Impala multiple times at festivals, and they're (or really, "he's," it's just Kevin Parker and a bunch of hired help) always FINE.  I remember seeing them at FYF in Los Angeles, before that festival crashed and burned amid a slew of horrifying sexual harrassment allegations against the founder, and poor Tame Impala had the misfortune of following Vince Staples on the same stage.  After Staples' incendiary, electric set, Tame Impala seemed positively neutered.  They were playing and it was FINE and every bro who had been throughout the festival was drawn to the sound like moths to MOR but I was mostly just meh.  I had reached the ultimate state of meh-ness.

[Looking back at the 2016 FYF schedule, it looks like Grimes was between Vince and Tame Impala, an event I have no memory of.]

So this album represented a marked departure in Tame Impala's sound, from a fuzzy-guitared neo-psych rave-up to a more bass-driven, obviously Bee Gees-influenced, electronica neo-disco.  That falsetto on almost every song starts out pretty and interesting and then starts to grate, tbqh.  I guess this album is "good," and it definitely has a sound, but to me, the songs all blur together and sound roughly the same.  I listened to it twice all the way through and I'm still not sure I could come up with a melody on my own, if pressed.  I guess "The Less I Know the Better" was the one real standout for me, and maybe it's no coincidence that it's the most guitar-forward song on the whole album.  But I kept thinking "there are maybe some good songs on here, why do they all have to sound exactly the same?"  Sounds to me like a problem with the producer.  Whoops, he's the producer too.  I'll be the one not watching them at Outside Lands, I guess.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip hop"
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th
Read more