Tame Impala - Currents

By Ryan Hook

“I can taste the music; it’s wet, it’s scrumptious.” That would be a personal quote of mine said after a mind bending, time altering performance from Tame Impala at Bumbershoot in the summer of 2016. After spending the entirety of the 2016 Winter aching for the sweet, bubbly sounds that Kevin Parker/Tame Impala created with the 2015 album, Currents, my tongue finally hinged on those sweet, sweet sounds and boy was it worth it.

Currents is an album that has skyrocketed Tame Impala from psychedelic poster boys to risk-taking pop stars. The disco-inspired, electronic music teasing, and psychedelically rooted pop album is a risky album for an artist whose prime audience were millennial deadheads and nostalgia mongering classic rockers. But Tame Impala, and Parker specifically, has made that transition smooth and done so with class.

Parker, a self-described “perfectionist,” creates an album marked by precision and honest songwriting. Beyond the fuse of electronic/psychedelic/pop that Parker surely nailed, the album is a bittersweet symphony. The album opener “Let It Happen” gives us a 9 minute psychedelic kick right away, with hints of Daft Punk, and to the objective listener Let It Happen feels like a yogic mantra. Yet Parker expresses the trials and tribulations of a break up, and the mantras feel like pages from a personal journal. Yes I’m Changing is an ode to acceptance. “Yes I’m Changing, Yes I’m moving on,” perhaps he is, but why the affirmation, why do we have to repeat it so often to feel that way. As the album turns around, we’re kicked with a punchy bassline in the widely popular The Less I Know the Better, a track that prefers ignorance over bliss. And while there’s a sense of overcoming, the album ends with the bass heavy, hip-hop inspired New Person, Same Mistakes

Breakup albums tends to air on the side of triumph, yet this one feels personal, it feels truthful, and most important of all, it feels universal. Breakups bring about a lot of strange emotions, we lie to ourselves, we try for ourselves, we place blame, we try so hard to understand, yet in the end we just need to ride the next wave, the next current, until we do it all over again.