Sunday, July 26, 2015

On the turntable this Sunday...Currents



Currents is the third studio album by Australian psychedelic rock act Tame Impala, released on 17 July 2015 on Interscope Records. Like the group's previous two albums, Currents was written, recorded, performed, and produced by primary member Kevin Parker. For the first time, Parker also mixed the music.

After releasing the group's previous record, Lonerism (2012), Parker began work on Currents, largely recording at his home studio in Fremantle. He engrossed himself with writing and recording, and owing to his reputation as a perfectionist, labored over the details of each song, ultimately forcing the release date to be delayed by two months. In contrast to the psychedelic rock sound of the project's prior work, Currents marks a shift to more dance-oriented music, with more emphasis placed on synthesizers than guitars. Parker was inspired to seek a change out of desire to hear Tame Impala's music played in dance clubs and a more communal setting. Thematically, the record is about the process of personal transformation, which many critics interpreted to be the result of a romantic break-up. The album's cover art depicting vortex shedding is a visualization of these themes.
Currents was preceded by the singles "Let It Happen", "'Cause I'm a Man", "Disciples", and "Eventually".

Kevin Parker explains that the first track "Let It Happen" is about "finding yourself always in this world of chaos and all this stuff going on around you and always shutting it out because you don't want to be part of it. But at some point, you realize it takes more energy to shut it out than it does to let it happen and be a part of 'it'."
"Eventually" concerns "knowing that you're about to damage someone almost irreparably, and the only consolation you get is this distant hope that they’ll be alright eventually, because you know they aren't going to be now or soon."

"Yes I'm Changing" is a song Parker claims he does not remember making: "A weird experience, because it was like it was someone else made the song. I had no memory of imagining it."

Parker stated that "The Less I Know the Better" "shouldn't be on a Tame Impala album because it has this dorky, white disco funk".

The cover art for Currents and its accompanying singles were created by Kentucky-based artist and musician Robert Beatty. Kevin Parker has said Currents' designs are based on a diagram of vortex shedding he remembered while trying to visualize the album's themes.  Beatty described how Parker's ideas for the album artwork "were all based on turbulent flow, the way liquid or air flows around objects."

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