Review Summary: Syd Barrett cracks the top on his second attempt...
Seems that Syd Barrett has been a little more successful upon resurrection.
Landing in Perth, Australia, under the pseudonym Kevin Parker, old Syd has continued to pump out his glittery, smug, bloated, pompous prog-rockery; a music society starved of any kind of mainstream creativity or originality whatsoever has fed upon it ravenously.
Tame Impala’s second album
Lonerism is on the verge of becoming the album that has revitalised Generation X’s faith in music, according to most rock magazines anyway. Whilst regeneration in creativity can only be a good thing,
Lonerism is not the album that would warrant it.
One man band Kevin Parker-who, with the exception of the joint effort
Elephant , plays and writes everything you hear on
Lonerism -tries way too hard, with extended song lengths, unnecessary effects and relentless over production dumping a big, glittery, prog-mess over the album.
Bloated cinematics mar several tracks.
Music To Walk Home By opens with what sounds like a water dispenser bubbling, with wooshy, clunky space effects rendering the lyrics incomprehensible. The dragging
Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control is as unnecessarily lengthy as its title: a seemingly endless six-minute headache inducer that shoots for a sense of perfect cacophony
Ã* la Barrett era Pink Floyd…and fails miserably; probably thanks to Parker’s squeaky falsetto, which is an attempt to capture the highest heights of a weed high and just sounds like someone stuck the Chipmunks in a wind tunnel.
However, the bigger problem that Parker inflicts upon his songs is extended, unnecessary length. Five of the twelve songs here are over five minutes, with two over six.
Keep On Lying starts mid-song with two minutes of tolerable, satisfying music, then stretches on and on and on, without any more substance…to just under six minutes, by which time the track is utterly irredeemable, as is the case with the aforementioned
Nothing That Has... , oh, you know which one I’m talking about, don’t make me write it all. Contrastingly, the simplified
Sun’s Coming Up , devoid of the lazy, smug prog-cinematics, with an endearingly childish piano taking the centre stage, would be a redeeming feature of the album…but goes for five and a half minutes when three or four would’ve sufficed. Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, the sub-minute length instrumental
She Just Won’t Believe Me is too-pointless-for-words, particularly since there’s no connection between the title and the clunky, empty, 1980s-Star-Trek, keyboard driven, spacey drone.
What is particularly infuriating is that Parker delivers two simple tracks that are absolutely awesome, displaying the fact that he
can write good music, but chooses instead to go for a lazy, faux-talented ‘Wow’ factor with all of his prog-nonsense.
Elephant , with its thundering, bouncy riff and irresistible vocal rhythm, is wiped clear of all the glittery, glossy effects and bloated song lengths that drag the rest of the album down. Conversely,
Apocalypse Dreams is the only spaced out song on the album that genuinely works: it starts with a jaunty gallop that drops spectacularly into a wide, panoramic odyssey, thoroughly deserving its six minute length.
So, to Kevin Parker, I say this: stop wasting the talent you obviously have. Keep the songs simple and master the brickwork of melody and structure before you put in the home cinema and indoor pool of prog-rock, and learn that extended song length is not a short cut for quality. Whilst I do not like
Lonerism , I am nonetheless eagerly awaiting Tame Impala’s third album to see if the festering ability can explode into something warranting the hype.
