"Nothing else matters, I don't care what I miss. Company's okay, solitude is bliss."
Reviewers love to take bands such as Tame Impala and reduce their sound to a list of its more obvious influences, and while this can be an informative approach to describing music for those unfamiliar with an artist (yes, I confess to doing this too), it can also implicitly suggests an artist's lack of originality.What this overlooks is that all art integrates influences and previous forms, so in the case of music, what makes something derivative or fresh-sounding depends a lot on whether or not it pushes these influences or previous forms into new contexts. On
Innerspeaker, Tame Impala effectively weave nearly every disparate thread of the psych-rock tradition, ranging from British Invasion to late-sixties San Francisco psychedelia to the hard-edged early-seventies riff-driven sound of Detroit bands such as MC5 to the space-jangle of another Aussie psych band The Church, into something truly distinct. Take, for example, "Expectation." While soaking with psychedelic overtones, there is also a surprisingly Electronic feel to the song, which envelops the listener in an unfamiliar billowy haze of sound that makes for some pretty damn fine listening. More please!
