STACK #184 Feb 2020

MUSIC FEATURE

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Kevin Parker reveals how the grains of time’s flow – memories past, and future dreams – informed the way he brewed up The Slow Rush , his beautiful new album asTame Impala. Words Zoë Radas The Sands of Tame

S econds, minutes, hours, years, and more related to time’s sojourn, bubble up through Tame Impala’s astonishing new album The Slow Rush – even the title of which alludes to Kevin Parker’s fascination with the passage of time. “I find the ideas of imagining the future, and remembering the past, so moving,” he says. “They’re a constant source of strong emotions for me. So, naturally I like to think that I can channel them through music – or channel music through them .” This is the fourth album under the rippling Tame Impala banner, following 2010’s Innerspeaker (nommed for two ARIAs), 2012’s Lonerism (winner of two ARIAs and nommed for a Grammy), and 2015’s Currents (which garnered Parker two personal ARIA Awards for his engineering and production, while the album itself won two awards and one Grammy nomination). So, how does The Slow Rush go? Meticulously structured, it begins with the enraptured, pulsing disco jam One More Year (“We got a whole year! 52 weeks! Seven days each! Four seasons, one reason… from today”), takes stock in the middle with the measured, soaring, tom-heavy On Track (“I know it’s nearly August… I know it’s been a slow year, nothing much to show here, but strictly speaking I’m still on track”), and ends with the dynamic, seven-minute epic One More Hour (“Whatever I did, I did it for love…for fun… for fame… but never for the money”), the little beating piano triads of yesterday, tomorrow, destiny, death, and love: all these conceptual granules,

In Is It True , the song’s protagonist declares his romantic love, but declines from solidifying its perpetuity, hedging his answers. The listener comes to comprehend that saying ‘I love you forever’ dilutes the ‘I love you’ part, because the ‘forever’ part is not quite an untruth, but a mistruth – an unknown. Parker says these lyrics were a bit of fun, and it seems he’s almost playing at an emotional approach, or testing it out. “I’m a romantic, so I do say things like [‘forever’]... I am singing from a different persona, but at the same time, I like thinking about that sort of thing,” he says. “The song’s about living in the present, or wanting to be in the present, and knowing that no one can be certain about the future. But, you know, I’m married – so by definition I have said ‘I love you forever’!” (Parker wed his long-time girlfriend Sophie Lawrence in February 2019, at a Western Australian vineyard.) Amongst the buoyant, propulsive beats of It Might Be Time – whose syncopations are like a pony’s merry, mid-gallop hoof-kicks – we find paralysing self-doubt: “It might be time to face it… you aren’t as young as you used to be” (with ‘young’ variously swapped with ‘fun’ and ‘cool’). Its synths wheel up and down in panicked octaves, recalling the most adrenaline-choked moments of a modern cinematic classic. “I know exactly what you mean – I started playing that line, and I wasn’t like ‘I’m going to make the Kill Bill siren,’ but I did like how it sounded,” Parker smiles. There’s also a couple of fake-outs across the track, where vocal tails echo out alone – but drums smash back in after a few beats. It

which seem to mark out the seconds between moments of whopping synths and cymbals. But rather than suggesting a path towards entropy, The Slow Rush constantly opens buds sparkling with observations about time’s mysterious effects. In the brilliant single Lost In Yesterday , Parker ponders why he was ever so worried during those halcyon twenty- somethings, and attests that “eventually terrible memories turn into great ones.” “I was worried about a lot back then,” he says slowly, then chuckles. “Yeah, geez, where to start? It’s funny because it’s not things

I find the ideas of imagining the future, and remembering the past, so moving

that I don’t worry about now. Worrying about people judging me, what I looked like… which is obviously still something I do care about, but the things that you worried about ten years ago just seem that extra level more trivial now. Because it’s like, what did all that count towards? Nothing. But our brains kind of justify it being more important now.”

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FEBRUARY 2020

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