Perth’s very own super indie stoner pop kids, Tame Impala, are all set to release their brand spanking new album ‘Innerspeaker’ and put simply, this record is epic.
It’s a reinvention of the lysergic sound that came to prominence in the ’60s and ’70s by a bunch of boys, the oldest of whom was born in the late ’80s. It’s a fascination with a bygone era, one fueled by free love and psychedelia that resulted in the formation of Tame Impala.
As such, the band adheres to a musical aesthetic which reflects the era. And that, in turn reflects the way this debut album was put together to create, as lead sing Kevin Parker describes it, an album full of ‘fuzzed out groovy dream pop’.
‘Nowadays when you record an album, it’s a whole lot less real than people think,’ Parker explained. ‘When someone sits down at a drum kit to play the drums that’s completely different to what you hear on 99 percent of albums now.
‘They do this thing where they pull up the drums on a computer and they align every beat that you play so that it’s perfectly in time. So even if you play it out of time and sloppy, they align it.
‘They also do this thing called auto tune where they take someone’s singing performance and they make it robotically in-tune. That’s just some of the stuff they do nowadays.’
It may be standard practice in the industry, but if that’s the case, then there’s nothing standard about Tame Impala. In fact, there album falls into the 1 percent category – recorded in a lo-fi manner with a complete lack of auto tune or beat correction.
‘There’s a lot of human errors on this album. There are a lot of flaws, sonic flaws, things that people instantly clean up when they start letting a professional LA producer at it. I really wanted all that on the album, all the errors and everything,’ said Parker.
‘Which is really difficult to swallow when you listen back to it. Every time you listen back to that song there’s that same little glitch that you did on the drums. It gets extremely difficult not to just press the auto tune button. It’s been such a temptation, but I guess that would be a lot of the cause for it sounding authentic.’
Fortunately, said ‘professional LA producer’ actually lived in upstate New York and was Dave Fridmann. He’s the man responsible for mastering Flaming Lips and MGMT’s blisteringly brilliant debut Oracular Spectacular. His magic touch on Innerspeaker merely amplifies the ingenuity of the band’s sound.
‘I like to think that we’re different to other bands in Australia,’ Parker mused when asked about Tame Impala’s distinct sound, ‘but someone could just as easily say that we’re the same as any other 60s rip off band. Which annoys me because it’s not meant to be in anyway a rehash, it’s new stuff.
‘It’s just that I like those sounds. The songs, the way they’re written and the way they’re meant to be performed is meant to be more like electronic sounding or like something really kind of modern. It’s just that I’ve always been obsessed with 60s and 70s sounds. I’ll always think that they sound cooler.’
As a result, so does Tame Impala. And the overall sound on the album is thanks, in part, to the recording session, which took place in an enormous tree house mansion in Margaret River with 180º views of the Indian Ocean.
‘It was quite focused really,’ Parker said of the recording session. ‘We’d wake up each morning and gaze at the horizon for a couple of hours and then record something quite casually. We’d record about 20 seconds of music and then put it on repeat and just loop it and sit out on the balcony and drink until the evening and then frantically record the rest of the song late at night. That was a usual day in the studio.’
Tame Impala’s debut album Innerspeaker is out May 21 through Modular. They will be appearing at Metro Fremantle on May 27. Tickets are available now. www.heatseeker.com.au
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
