Pink Floyd meets Michael Jackson. Say it ain't so?
Currents is a studio album so exquisite, with off-the-chart, hi-fidelity production values, it is hard to believe that mastermind Kevin Parker recorded it by himself in a small shack in Perth, Australia. He recorded every instrument, every beat, every vocal BY HIMSELF, turning his solitary studio effort into its own kind of art form. Although it sounds like big-label suits blew through $2 million to employ the best session players of our day, Currents is the brainchild of a single chill dude with serious girl problems.
While it is a towering recording achievement and an audiophile's daydream, Currents is also an immense pleasure to listen to, as its canyon-sized grooves gloriously run to star-soaked coastlines. Parker's first two albums as Tame Impala were guitar-centric forays into 60s psyche-rock and 70s prog, pressed and smoothed out with his expert ear for unadulterated pop music. Innerspeaker and Lonerism were excellent albums, however, they did not capture my aesthetic imagination in the way Currents has with its zeitgeisty impulse to blur boundaries in thrilling new ways. Parker pushes heady psychedelia into the 80s and beyond, where it devours disco, synth-rock, and programmed drums, spitting out iridescent, weightless, and air-tight soul music.
You can read dozens of articles about Parker and his masterful third album. But I just want to briefly discuss my favorite track, "The Less I Know The Better." It is standard fare from a lyrical perspective, the classic drama of a dude seeing his former lady with another dude. It stinks. Thankfully, Parker's dip in the pool of self-pity produces the finest groove of the year. My head nearly exploded the first few listens when Parker crosses a bridge and starts running into melodic, pop-music bliss, casting a vocal/rhythm spell that could only be rivaled by something from Off The Wall.
Don't make me wait forever!
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