Tame Impala - The Slow Rush

February 14, 2020 - Modular/Interscope

Tame Impala a.k.a. Kevin Parker is back with The Slow Rush, their new album which attempts to capture the paradoxical fly-by of time between youth and old age—between the first kiss and the middle of a long-term relationship. In searching that sweet, sweet surrender we all have been hearing about, in one form or another, since the Crusades, is found. Partially, the album hints at letting go of earlier success; images and memories of which have proven powerfully ungainly to many artists who’ve experienced surges of popularity in response to one release or another. Yet in their practice of succumbing to what time does, we find the authenticity resurgent in The Slow Rush, that unconfined yet old-rock inspired vocal style and crisply muffled percussion which dislocates the uninitiated listeners from the musical era Parker is working in.

At times the album seems the wrong format for what Kevin Parker intended with this latest project. A book of poems may have suited him better. His vocal nimbleness at times veers outside the meter in excusable, but distracting fashion. At first glance, The Slow Rush finds its own ethos thwarted, but in that tectonic thwarting (I.e. Parker continually searching for the vocal pocket, circling it in varying degrees) rises the precipice between accepting that one never gets back into the groove from which one left, and accepting that one searches for the groove indefinitely. So the thwarting in fact reaffirms. At least, that’s the first listen. On subsequent go-arounds, one starts to realize, Parker isn’t missing the beat—he's talking in song, as if the album were his porch and you’ve come to ask about the world he’s lived through. 

Regardless of its shortcomings, The Slow Rush has much to say to younger and coeval audiences with plenty of groove, trip, and ballad to deliver the message. Let’s get to some of the highlights. ‘One More Year’ is the zenest (this is a superlative that will belong in the dictionary before too long) song out there right now regarding romantic love, hopefulness, and stagnation. Kicking off with psychedelic droning that, at least for this listener, manages not to dull but engage with minute chord changes and modulations, not to mention that it pairs perfectly with its subject matter: the fear that a choice of habit has led to what two people will do for the rest of their lives. Parker writes, “I worry our horizons bear nothing new...cause what we did/One day on a whim/Has slowly become/All we do.” But wait, where does the fear come from? Suddenly, the psychedelic intro, which is imbued with a male voice takes on the quality of an adult babbling with a child, of the finger moving rapidly between the lips to create the trademark noise for zaniness. Parker himself pokes at the question in the next verse, still grappling. “I never wanted any other way to spend our lives,” so again, this palpable but mysterious terror comes not from the fracturing of reality against a dream unfulfilled. He locates the fear quickly in the song, which is fortunate, because it likely took him roughly thirty-two to thirty-three of his thirty-four years to arrive in real time at this conclusion. Are you ready for a spoiler? The answer? It’s this: “Why don’t we just say, ‘One more year’?” A deliberate agreement to keep going and see how it feels for one more year. Take responsibility, take agency, the slow rush is also you, and you’re going to lose your mind pretending it’s one thing and you’re another: “One more year/Not caring if we do the same thing every week...Of living like I’m only living for me...Of never talking about where we’re gonna be.” What at first seems like an intro to insecurity is more clearly opening up into a life-affirming album. Replete! With wisdom. 

‘Instant Destiny’ follows through on the convictions reached in ‘One More Year.’ A song about receiving and riding a big high, ‘Instant Destiny’ leans hard on its shoe-gazey hook, “I’m about to do something crazy.” The vocal stretches come off a bit campy, nearly operatic but without the support of the other instrumentals, lending a tenuous sense—ostensibly Parker’s own tenuous sense—to the convictions listed such as, “We could get a home in Miami/Go and get married/Tattoo your name on my arm.” Tacitly implied in these weak tropes of whimsy is the way excitement erodes quicker than nearly every other substance. A hunch confirmed by the following track, ‘Borderline,’ which by its own description tarries the drug-induced line, “Dangerously fine and unforgiving...between the tides of pain and rapture.” 

Exposure to these two extremes in one “fixed-state” (or if we don’t like the idea of a fixed state we may say a condensed period of time during which two normally-distant emotions are very close to a person and may even commingle where in the non-psychedelic state one would have to undergone significantly different stimulation to travel between “pain and rapture”), circles back to Parker’s response to fear and doubt—which is confrontation, a sentiment he restates more explicitly in later tracks—he asks the questions head on: 

“Will I be known and loved? 

Is there one that I trust?... 

Will I be so in love?... 

Shout out to what is done, 

R.I.P., here comes the sun.” 

Once you have internalized what is going on in this album, you no longer need this review. ‘Posthumous Forgiveness,’ details a boy’s growing up against the bitterness of a father who left him and his mother behind and his discovery of forgiveness. ‘Breathe Deeper,’ is a catchy little tune, lyrically simple and affirmation focused. The rest of the album can be summed up this way in varying permutations. First darkness, then the light. Then, more light. Kevin Parker and team want to make the light apparent. They want to make themselves a prism so that listeners can become aware of what all the light is made of. The Slow Rush may have abandoned much of the hard-nosed grooviness that brought the band to prominence, but in its stead is a new and gentler funk rife with sympathy and wisdom, not devoid of heartache, but rather than being consumed with, has consumed heartache and converted it to nutrients, to abundance. Time doesn’t fly by, you do; you are the passage of time, you can always slow down. ⛰️

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