Tame Impala for a late lunch this Wednesday – A sampling from several venues between 2010 and 2018.
For a band I predicted a huge future for when I first heard them on My Space, they’ve exceeded my expectations and Kevin Parker continues to astound and amaze, almost 20 years later.
For those who don’t know, Tame Impala is the brain child of Kevin Parker. It has been largely him in the studio and him at the controls. It’s during tours that he assembles a band to emulate on stage what he does on his own. Only the live concerts have the extra added bonus of an honest-to-god psychedelic stage presentation. The music takes on added dimensions and weight and the experience is, without a doubt, something not to take a pass on.
From. Wikipedia:
Parker’s decision to make the music for Tame Impala in the studio by himself is a result of his liking “the kind of music that is the result of one person constructing an awesome symphony of sound. You can layer your own voice 700 times for half a second if you want, and I just love that kind of music”. However, Parker has to translate his music to a live setting with the band, and the band doesn’t play the songs until they have been recorded. “The only jamming that’s done as a band is done a long time after the song is recorded for the sake of the live environment. It’s good for us, because we can take a song that’s been recorded and do what we want to it: slow it down, speed it up, make it 10 seconds or 10 minutes long. It gives us a lot of freedom.”
Some favoured and often-used effects by Parker include phasing, delay, reverb and fuzz. Experimentation with different effects pedals such as the BOSS BR600 and Moog Moogerfooger MF-105M has led to Parker creating new and unique sounds. “If you make an effort to not put the pedals in the order you’re meant to, then you’ll end up with something new-sounding. We don’t have any things that we got from another planet or anything; it’s the same things everyone else has used. People have a distortion pedal and then a reverb pedal. A reverb is meant to make it sound like it’s in a cathedral or something. If you put it the other way around, it won’t sound like a guitar being played in a church; it’ll sound like a church being stuffed inside a shoebox and then exploded. You can do different things just by treating things differently”.
Parker has commented on his process for making music: “I’ll have a sudden, spontaneous vision of a song, have all the parts mapped out in mind, and do my best to record it as quick as I can. I’ll find my eight-track and do a quick demo of just the riff, or a verse or a chorus. The song will go for like 30 seconds. I’ll have a whole bunch of them [demos] and then I’ll just choose which ones to make into full songs”. Parker has a strong sense of melody in his music, having composed “excessively melodic music from about the age of 12 to 15”. For Parker, the music comes before the lyrics: “I usually write the lyrics after the melody and its timing have been decided. But the words have to be meaningful. I try to synchronize certain words with the best parts of the melody, but it can be really difficult and does my head in. I like to keep the meaning pretty open and ambiguous so that it’s not just me that gets something out of the lyrics. I usually write lyrics from a persona rather than tell a specific story.” Parker also said: “Usually I am sufficiently motivated to think of new songs every day, but I usually forget them. I seem to get an emotional kick out of sensing feelings of general desperation or hopelessness, whether it’s me or someone near me or someone in a movie or anything. It’s really difficult to sit down and force yourself to write a song, and that forced nature usually comes out in the song, so I just have to wait until they come to me.”
Okay – no excuses – grab something, relax and hit Play.
