In the astonishing music video for their pulsating, psychedelic song Lucidity, Kevin Parker of the much-acclaimed Australian band Tame Impala lets go of a weather balloon, with a video camera dangling beneath it.
The barren outback quickly spirals away as the camera is pulled into the upper atmosphere, so high that it begins to photograph the curvature of the earth, as the gnarled guitars’ sounds break back into the song’s trippy chorus and bridge.
It’s easy to compare that imagery to the band’s current, stratospheric rise in alt-rock popularity. And yet it’s conversely too easy to call the band’s psychedelic underpinning and its debut album Innerspeaker, which has won praise from such make-or-break websites as Pitchfork and London’s Rough Trade’s best-of list, as a retread of Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Parker says he finds that even as the band continues its current tour of North America – in this continent of ours where classic rock never died – critics are treating the band as more than revamped sixties psychedelia. “There’s always a mixture of people who interpret it differently,” he says.
Is that early Pink Floyd, British sound an influence, though? “In terms of actually assuming the attitude and perspective of people making music back then, I don’t think that’s embedded in our music … but certainly, those kinds of sounds I love to hear, less crystal clear, less shiny,” Parker says.
The band records mostly at home in Perth or in makeshift locales on tour, rarely in a studio. Often it’s done simply in Parker’s living room.
Yet, as in Toronto and other Canadian cities, Perth has such an amorphous, underground music scene that musicians come in and out of bands and play regularly on each others’ recordings. Musicians rarely stick to a commercial concept of a band. As Parker says, “We do most of our recording at home with different projects and bands – Tame Impala just being one of them.”
Cross-pollination runs rampant between bands, “if you can even call them bands. We all share members. It’s about being able to make as many different types of music as you want.”
That looseness can get in the way once an act starts taking off. Tame Impala’s record label and manager, for instance, gave the band money to get away from Parker’s home and into a remote house outside Perth, by the seaside, to make sure the debut album got done. “The people I was living with at the time are also complete music addicts. It’s the only thing they do as well, so there was this constant noise [back at my home],” Parker adds.
This leads to one of the biggest surprises for Tame Impala’s growing international audience: The band really isn’t a band. They are a four piece on stage and in interviews on their current summer tour, which includes a stop at the Coachella festival in California earlier this month and will hit the UK’s massive Glastonbury festival in June. Meanwhile, publicity shots for the album show Tame Impala as a slacker-looking three piece.
But really, it’s primarily just Parker, who records most of the material, with the other musicians coming in as needed.
“That’s the one thing that’s less known about Tame Impala. There is this large misconception that we’re this band’s band. It’s really not a democratic, jam-out band at all. It’s a really calculated, layering project,” with Parker creating the music mostly on his own.
Will that change with Tame Impala’s notoriety rising from city to city? “With the next album, I’ve already done a lot of recording for it, and it’s sounding quite different. It’s more everything. It is definitely heavier, but at the same time, it’s more pop and more spacey. In the way that the first album is more earthy, the second album has very much more of a spacey vibe.
“I don’t know, it sounds really cliché…” he says laughingly, catching himself talking the psychedelic talk.
Tame Impala plays Montreal’s Café Campus April 30, and Toronto’s Phoenix Concert Theatre May 1.
