Tame Impala

Currents

The result is the purest — and most complex — distillation of everything that makes the band such a nearly physical pleasure to listen to, whether it’s the sprawling riffs found on their 2010 debut, Innerspeaker, or this album’s taffy-lurid swirls.

Currents as an album overall is fantastic. There are plenty of catchy grooves and lyrics which makes the entire album have high replay value. However, we can't help but feel that they played it a little too safe.

Currents makes a convincing case for facing the unknown. An album that's virtually crawling with strong, infectious melodies, it's likely to draw brand new prey to Tame Impala's territory.

The constant cloudy-headed experimentation gets a little exhausting over the course of the album’s 13-track, 52-minute runtime, but the lyrics provide the lucid emotional core that keeps these spacey songs grounded.

Hearing a band push itself beyond a sort of sonic stasis will nearly always be far more interesting than hearing retreads of past glories. Tame Impala seems well aware of this and more than willing to challenge its audience. And for that they should be applauded.

No matter your proclivities for this new style, it’s hard to deny that Currents sounds fantastic. Parker isn’t using any new instruments here, he’s reappropriating instruments he has been using all along. Only this time, everything is curated cleanly.

Currents won’t quite get to join the club of all-time great third albums, but it’s still an impressive effort. Once again, Kevin Parker has made an album that has little in common with its predecessor, yet sounds surprisingly sure-footed.

The title of Tame Impala's third full-length record – Currents – suggests a number of things; something popular, flowing, a certain pace, electricity, and a course of action. In many ways this brilliant record encompasses a sense of all these things, managing to sound both acutely personal and universal at the same time.

Currents pushes the Perth psych-rockers further into the electronic, its fascinatingly produced tracks balancing pure pop with odd ambience, while its lyrics (especially Eventually) trend break-up record. But the album is most fascinating when Parker grapples with the limits of change.

These songs might inhabit unsteady mental states, but each component could have been places with tweezers and a jeweller's loupe.

The previously aggressive swirls and surges have abated, with Parker now filling the space with hazy, Gallic grooves that bear a distinct air of Air.

Rockist doubts aside, Tame Impala is very much present on Currents. Their acidic melodies may now be adorned with sparkling keyboards and heady dance drums—flavors fully outside the rock wheelhouse—but Parker’s aim is to unite the two sensibilities, not to remove the band from the rock formula altogether.

Although Currents is, in many ways, a showcase of difference, Parker also toys with repetition as a unifying theme, sonically and lyrically.

While some fans may be disappointed that Tame Impala phased out the more straight-up rock aspect of their sound, they've maintained their dizzying psychedelia on Currents.

It might not hit with the sit-up-and-listen immediacy of previous albums, but make no mistake, ‘Currents’ is just as accomplished.

The fuzz-guitar fans may find themselves a bit underserved here. Best to suck it up and embrace those drum sounds, which are as precise and exquisite as ever.

Shorn of a couple of tracks, Currents would be rather special. Instead, it's a very good album with some real highpoints but for an innovator like Parker, it falls slightly short of what you might expect.

The shift in sonic palette – the displacement of sun-bleached, illusory fuzz for a cosmos of super-clean synthetic strings – reflects the real life changes he documents with simple lyricism. The album acts as an immaculately crafted apology for this change.

The guitar rides in the back, the keyboards up front. The beats have a synthesized snap even when they're live drums, and even the dreamiest tracks pack a pop bounce.

Tame Impala returns with a new sound.

It’s reductive and doesn’t help really anyone by saying the hooks just aren’t there on the level they used to be, but it’s telling that I searched the rest of Currents in vain for anything as immediate as the crashing waterfall of multitracked vocals on the chorus to “The Moment.”

While Currents would have made a decent Kevin Parker solo album, people coming to the album and expecting to hear the Tame Impala they are used to will most likely end up quite disappointed.

While Parker’s home studio achievement is impressive ... the sonic unity here means the tracks bleed into one another. Currents details a painful rebirth, but you’d never guess as much.

Nonetheless, a genre detour is highly appropriate for a heartbreak album that has calculus at its heart and its commentary.

Currents is an album that I want to like much more than I do. It’s not a disco album. Not even nearly. It’s also not that psychedelic. It’s basically an exercise in pop with occasional lush melodies, elaborate structuring and, at times, truly, extraordinarily, piss-awful lyrics.

The feeling of listening to Currents is the same as that of seeing a photo with the “Toaster” filter slapped over it for the 50th time.