While it has not been a good year for the roses, twenty twelve has been pretty amazing for Tame Impala. That is what Kevin Parker thinks and he should damn well know. During the past twelve months he has led the touring Tame Impala across five continents, in the case of the Antipodes, North America and Europe at least twice, and has drank cocktails on the beach in Rio de Janeiro. In the same time-frame he has forgotten to be a vegetarian and remembered that he spent the first half of the year giving his whole life to the studio Tame Impala’s second album. It was a truly noble sacrifice because he has since been able to watch Lonerism climb to nose bleeding heights in the album charts both sides of the Atlantic before it finally pitched its freak flag right at the very summit of his native Australian equivalent.
Lonerism’s statement of intent is announced right from the very start. The tattoo of Be Above It’s rhythm gamely holds onto the coattails of Parker’s imagination as it swoops and soars, the reverberations of its vapour trail still rattling around in your frazzled brain for days afterwards. And so it goes, on and on and on, towards infinity the music goes on. Propelled forever onwards and upwards by drums straight out of The Soft Bulletin, the spirit of Arthur Lee and a mighty phalanx of synthesisers and guitar, it just goes on and on. Parker’s diffused, dreamy vocals are somehow swept along in the backdraft of the record’s psychedelic swirl. “Everything is changing” he sings on Apocalypse Dreams, as Lonerism moves further and further away from its predecessor’s rock n roll roots, evolving into some fluid, mind-expanding groove the likes of which can lose you for hours on end.
Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control concludes Parker on the album’s penultimate track, the accuracy of his assertion clearly not lost in the mist and haze of the song’s lysergic dream. As 2012 fades away Kevin Parker now finds himself sitting on top of the world. But despite Lonerism’s inherent sense of emotional isolation he is not alone up there, for deep within the grooves of this euphoric record he has graciously chosen to share with us his view.
[Rating:4.5]
