It’s no longer rock ’n’ roll (but I like it)

THE SLOW RUSH

Tame Impala Fiction

From the shuddering opening warp of One More Year to blissfully euphoric finale One More Hour, time is the insistent focus of

The Slow Rush, the fourth album from Tame Impala. And Kevin Parker has certainly taken his sweet time making it.

Although he performs live with a five-piece band, Tame Impala’s records are written, played, sung and produced by Parker entirely solo. The psychedelic guitar drive of his 2010 debut, Innerspeaker, saw the Australian multiinstrumentalist hailed as a saviour of rock. It is a status the long-haired, bearded 34-year-old still holds in some quarters, although the music he makes barely resembles rock at all anymore. With each successive release, Parker has further embraced the digital technology and sonic palette of R & B, hip hop, electro and techno in service of his stoner grooves, acknowledging that the locus of the psychedelic experience has long since shifted from rock arenas to dance clubs.

His global breakout 2015 album, Currents, was so closely aligned to the artier edges of contemporary pop that Parker found himself in demand as a producer and collaborator by such established stars as Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Mark Ronson and Mick Jagger.

Commercial success has freed Parker to indulge his perfectionism. “Finishing an album is by far the hardest thing I have to go through,” he admitted of his five-year struggle to complete The Slow Rush. Thankfully, the results prove worth the wait.

There is a level of detail to Parker’s productions that encourages deep listening: he has an evident fascination with the elaborate arrangements of his Seventies progressive rock heroes, Pink Floyd, ELO, Yes and Supertramp (from whom Parker blatantly borrows a stabbing piano dynamic on It Might Be Time). Nevertheless, the sound he conjures is blazingly contemporary, a spectacular widescreen blow-up of luxurious synths and sleek dance grooves.

It is a kind of prog pop, harnessing the power of 21st-century chartbusters yet liberated from the constraints of formal song structure.

Dreamy and digressive, Parker’s songs meander and drift as if going nowhere before suddenly switching track. It can be hard to get to grips with, but there is purpose to such apparent

There is a level of detail to the music that encourages deep listening

waywardness. Meditative lyrics grapple with the relentless passage of time, lending emotional grit to his woozily blissful jams.

On a long, strange and deeply moving piece titled Posthumous Forgiveness, Parker calls out to his late father. “I wanna tell you about the time… I had Mick Jagger on the phone,” he sings, as if desperate to make a connection across the void. It may not be rock’n’roll, but

I doubt Jagger’s name has ever been dropped with such affecting tenderness.

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IN HIS OWN SWEET TIME Kevin Parker took five years to follow up his last Tame Impala album