The Music
Tame Impala come of age
Tame Impala's Kevin Parker talks about the recording process of debut album Innerspeaker in an seaside mansion/treehouse in Perth.
The Tame Impala story is three boys from Perth, two of whom met at age thirteen in music class (Kevin Parker and Dom Simper) before finding like-mindedness with a new Perth immigrant (Jay Watson). Kevin, the nucleus of the trio, recorded some songs at home and created the Tame Impala EP that went on to sell a remarkable 20,000+ copies in Australia alone. Along came Modular Recordings and signed the boys and the little lads from Perth never dreamed that they would be whisked across the country (and beyond) to support the likes of Yeasayer and MGMT. And that's just the start of the fairytale.
Now having released their debut album, recording tracks in a bedroom seems worlds away. However: just because the band has a few more bells and whistles attached to its name these days doesn't mean that it's a different beast. For their first LP, Kevin recalls that "Our label wanted us to go somewhere like L.A. and get a whiz-bang producer. It was a saga. We're all friends now."
The band won the battle, getting to record their debut album InnerSpeaker in the homelier surroundings of an isolated "mansion/treehouse" in Perth, with Kevin himself handling production duties along with Death In Vegas's Tim Holmes and mixing by Dave Fridmann (MGMT / Flaming Lips)."I had this terrible fear of everything suddenly changing... of the way that Tame Impala worked changing," he confesses. "The original EP was just me, and when it turned out that people liked it I had to wonder, 'What is it about this that works? Where's the magic?' I didn't want to lose anything."
Magic can't be too hard to generate when your recording studio is the aforementioned mansion/treehouse. "It's actually a house on top of a huge hill, made of like, a thousand scraps of wood," Kevin reveals. "And the house is also right next to the ocean, so there were all these whales passing by doing the spurt-hole thing!"
The isolation and expansive space - and spurt-hole sightings - that defined these inspirational surrounds are themes that permeate Innerspeaker, an hour-long foray into the time-honoured tradition of psychedelic rock at its shimmering, thunderous best.
While the strange, sonorous creature that is Tame Impala may indeed be evolving, InnerSpeaker is a refreshing indication that the band is more interested in earning its stripes than shedding its skin.
By Keva York for Groupie Magazine
