Tame Impala’s second album, ‘Lonerism’ can already be streamed on NPR website, and a few tracks have even been shared on Soundcloud, but I have only listened to it twice so far, so this can’t be a review, but rather a first impression. There is an overwhelming psychedelic feeling present from track to track, with big circular, fuzzy out or reverb guitars and synths making druggy waves, and more pedal effects and grandiose moments than you can stand in a few minutes. At first it may sound a little repetitive, and I will certainly need many repeats to make sense of everything that’s going on some tracks.
Beside an obvious nostalgia for 70s psychedelic rock, it’s amusing that certain of their bizarre bleeps and other spacey eccentricities reminded me the awesome weirdness of the Flaming Lips – just listen to these rhythmic-pounding drums and vibrating guitars on ‘Be Above It’ – but the album is in fact produced by Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev produced David Fridmann, so this is not a surprise there! It could be the Flaming Lips mixed with Ariel Pink’s lo-fi psych-pop-feel approach and even his dreamy-passed-out-distant vocals; but Pink’s music is never too far away from in the 60-70s sound, so we are back to the beginning. I heard a lot of Beatles’ psychedelic-era in ‘Lonerism’, whereas Kevin Parker’s vocals have often been compared to John Lennon’s in the reviews of Tame Impala's previous album. Sure, there is a resemblance, whatever it is voluntary or coincidental. If he sounds like a young Lennon at times, it didn’t strike me at first, but ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’ and ‘Sun’s Coming Up’, with its naked vocals and piano part – a big departure from the heavy smoggy sound of the rest of the album – reminded me just this!
The whole album is a heavy fog of psychoactive drugs, wrapping your senses, and it is at first difficult to distinguish the songs one from another during this trippy-space-rock experience. But this is probably because, contrarily to the Beatles’ tunes, almost none of Tame Impala’s songs have this classic pop structure, rather they build spacey and dizzy rock soundscapes. May be the exception is 'Elephant’ a song which sounds different from the rest, with a bolder more aggressive sound, they are more T. Rex rocking on this one! As a matter of fact, the song caught the attention of Todd Rundgren – whose album ‘A Wizard, a True Star’ influenced greatly the band for ‘Lonerism’– and Rundgren even remixed it.
And the subject of the album is, as you can tell from its title, about the glory of being alone, about the ‘process of discovering that it’s in your blood to be wandering around on the outside of everything’ as Parker told Pitchfork. Wandering around alone may be, but Syd Barrett, John Lennon and Wayne Coyne are not too far away in this psych-pop-land.
The album is out on October 9 in the US, but meanwhile you can stream it or even download for free one of the tracks, ‘Apocalypse Dreams’, on their label website.