At first hear, Tame Impala’s Currents seems like a lightweight and breezy album. It’s is crammed with nostalgia-inducing synths evocative of hazy summer time mornings and listless afternoons. But when there’s a bittersweet aftertaste, it’s as a result of these hazy synths obscure Kevin Parker’s melancholy lyrics.
Greater than something, Currents is an album outlined by a way of longing: for change, for a way of id, and for a brand new starting. It’s a basic album that intertwines nostalgia and doubt to encapsulate simply how complicated the search for a recent begin could be.
Launched on July 17, 2015, Currents marked a departure from the extra conventional psych-rock that made up Tame Impala’s first two albums. It was a DIY endeavor within the truest sense, in that it discovered Parker writing, producing, performing, recording, and mixing the album all whereas holed up in his dwelling studio in Perth, Australia. These efforts clearly paid off, with Currents turning into his band’s highest-charting launch, incomes a Grammy nomination, and refashioning Parker as a grasp of pop.
Balancing hope and doubt
Past its ever-evolving panorama of synths and dance-worthy drums, Currents is about balancing moments of hope and doubt. An immediate that feels heat and fuzzy can simply as instantly really feel panic-inducing. “The Moment” is simply one of many many nice sounding songs on the album that, while you actually hear, hides darker layers, unfolding into contemplations on the overwhelming anxiousness that you simply would possibly by no means be prepared for what’s coming subsequent.
The 24-hour information cycle has developed into a relentless social-media circuit, now extra self-perpetuating than ever earlier than. Even if you wish to break away, it’s laborious to even separate your self from it. On “Reality In Motion,” Parker appears like his coronary heart is in overdrive, working in circles. Time appears to maneuver so quick that you simply don’t even have time to gauge the severity and the influence of the whole lot taking place round you. And that results in a way of dread – that the whole lot might come crashing down round you regardless of your finest makes an attempt to flee.
As a result of fashionable life is working at such breakneck pace, it’s laborious to know which manner is up. “Past Life” describes simply how laborious it may be to gauge change; the particular person you had been only a few years in the past appears like somebody you don’t know in any respect. Change is so fixed that it’s laborious to even belief your outdated self as a relentless variable.
Extra culturally apt than ever
All through the album, Parker’s synths sound like they’re underwater, typically static and garbled. That may make the instrumentation sound inviting, however as a mirrored image of Parker’s emotion, it might probably really feel like drowning. What seems like dance music is definitely reflective meditation, and that’s extra culturally apt than ever.
All through Currents, Parker is ready for the unidentifiable moments that may overpower. His fixation on the previous prevents him from being as free as he’d prefer to be within the current. Mixed with this doomed anticipation, it appears like he could by no means handle to search out the discharge he seeks. And but he finally does discover it “Yes I’m Changing.” “They say people never change, but that’s bullsh__t, they do/Yes I’m changing, can’t stop it now,” he sings.
On “The Less I Know the Better,” Parker describes a less-than-perfect relationship to counsel that everybody’s happier once they’re ignorant – and perhaps that’s true. The world’s collective lack of ability to be content material is a component and parcel of fixed cultural overstimulation. And that may really feel hopeless! However Currents definitely isn’t hopeless – simply unsure. The need to vary and evolve regardless of not understanding the place it would lead you is just not solely the driving power of the file, however a common theme that continues to talk to audiences at this time. Change could be unattainable – however it may be simply across the nook.
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