Tame Impala goes to release her most extroverted album at the worst time: Mid-February 2020, we recently had to lock ourselves out for a while. ‘Slow rush’ seemed designed for festivities, but stayed in the music to dance without leaving the house. At least until the end of last year, self-sufficient genius Kevin Parker once again saw faces with touring musicians.
Have they entered Primavera? No one would have said this during the opening, which was an unfocused ‘One more year’: okay, this project was born in psychedelia and never stopped developing the idea of a certain blur., but that sounded like a self-boycott. The sound seemed to take shape with the ‘hard’ appeal of ‘Elephant’, but ‘Yesterday Disappeared’ seemed to come from another scene. The blurriness sometimes took the form of long stretches without tension, especially in ‘Runway house city clouds’, a song from the classic ‘InnerSpeaker’ that they now salvage from the ‘setlist’ ten years later.
But there were moments of euphoria to be expected: moments when Parker believed more in her potential as a pop star and did justice to the melodic and rhythmic sophistication of hits like the progressive progressive ‘Quit’. twists always work, the marital breakup song ‘Finally’ (too ELO) or ‘The less I know the better’ got us imagining a Primavera with ‘roller disco’. Not forgetting his version (meticulous premiere) The ‘last nite’ from The Strokes is a giveaway for potential victims of the aforementioned cancellation first friday.