Tame Impala<\/p>\n
Lonerism<\/p>\n
Modular<\/p>\n
9\/10<\/p>\n
Released<\/strong>: October 8, 2012<\/p>\n If you\u2019re anything like me, you might be spending the summer\u2019s dying days wondering what it is that people so love about it; weather as persistent as it was horrendous and the depressing ubiquity of Boris Johnson\u2019s absurd head of hair made for one of the more underwhelming holidays of recent years. You could do worse, by way of a reminder, than to get hold of a copy of Tame Impala\u2019s debut full-length, Innerspeaker<\/em>, which stands as a sonic representation of everything good about the calendar\u2019s middling months; a hazy, psychedelic treat of a record, best enjoyed on a sunny afternoon.<\/p>\n Innerspeaker <\/em>took Tame Impala right around the world \u2013 from headline tours that steadily increased in scale to supporting Foo Fighters at Milton Keynes Bowl \u2013 and it wasn\u2019t until late last year that Kevin Parker \u2013 the brains and, for the most part, brawn of the outfit \u2013 was able to record new songs that had been on the back burner for some time, in his native Australia. The result is Lonerism<\/em>, a record that suggests that the laidback outlook of the last album extended to Parker\u2019s attitude towards the traditional pressure that comes with releasing a follow-up; this is as assured a sophomore record as I\u2019ve heard for some time.<\/p>\n Ironically, the band have moved on \u2013 at least in part \u2013 from the carefree pastures of their last effort; as the title suggests, Parker focuses lyrically on themes of isolation and displacement, and there\u2019s a degree of purpose, perhaps even aggression, in the album\u2019s sound to reflect that \u2013 the pianos pound on \u2018Apocalypse Dreams\u2019, looped, \u2018Tomorrow Never Knows\u2019-esque drums clatter through opener \u2018Be Above It\u2019, and \u2018Elephant\u2019 is dominated by the sort of stampeding, bluesy riff that The Black Keys would be proud of.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say the band\u2019s signature grooves are missing in action on Lonerism<\/em>; \u2018Mind Mischief\u2019 is a classic Impala slow burner, whilst \u2018Why Won\u2019t\u00a0They Talk to Me?\u2019 brings the record\u2019s pace grinding to a near halt with its spaced-out melancholy. The record’s greatest triumph, though, is the delicate balance it strikes between celebrating its influences and outright copying them; the album wears its admiration of the Woodstock age of psychedelia proudly on its sleeve, but not so much so that there\u2019s nothing new or exciting here \u2013 it\u2019s the freshest sounding rock record of the year. As odes to the sixties go, Tame Impala do for weed and acid what Mad Men<\/em> does for whisky and cigarettes; they\u2019ve made that era sound as good as that show makes it look, and produced a genuine thrill of a record\u00a0in the process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lonerism strikes a delicate balance between celebrating its influences and outright copying them<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":759,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[137,2912,2913,2914,2915,2916,26,2917],"coauthors":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6799"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/759"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6799\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6799"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mancunion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=6799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}