The Fresh 50: 1

It’s been a long and winding road, but we’ve made it. After sorting the wheat from the chaff, we’ve finally come up with our most promising, plugged-in, switched-on, clued-up band in Australia. And the winner is...

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#1   Tame Impala

    For a band that’s so far spent more time defending themselves against accusations of plundering sounds of the past than they have on stage playing their instruments, it might come as a shock to see Tame Impala named the freshest band in Australia. But the truth about these guys is they have more innovation and musical artistry running through the greasiest follicle of their lead singer’s hair than most other bands in Australia, nay the world, will ever likely possess. Need proof? Name me one other artist on the planet right now that sounds anything remotely like Tame Impala. Go one, just one. Can’t do it? Didn’t think so.

    “We try and avoid certain clichés of all kinds of music that people use today,” asserts drummer Jay Watson, “because there are certain drum beats and certain vocal inflections and melodies that a lot of modern bands use that make us go, ‘Ooooh (shudders in disgust), we’re not doing that!’ When you eliminate all of that stuff and you avoid all the cheese, I think it comes out sounding unique.

    “I think we put a lot of effort into making every song have a bit of an epiphany sound and making each song, chorus and jam as meaningful as possible. I hope it’s that that people recognise, that it’s good song writing because there’s a lot of bands that sound really cool out there and have acclaimed albums or whatever, but the song writing’s not that important.”

    While everyone else is happy to go with the flow, Tame Impala are swimming upstream, rubbing against the grain, refusing to fit into any preconceived notion of what a modern-day rock band should be. They don’t even play encores ferfuckssake! They’re just four chilled-out stoner guys from Perth not pretending to be anything they aren’t. Their music is born out of the creative recesses of singer Kevin Parker’s mind, who has indeed listened to a lot of Cream, and a lot of The Kinks, and a lot of The Beatles, but has also enjoyed the unchartered musical terrains of Todd Rundgren and dabbled in the trend-setting Kraut rock of Kraftwerk. And while Kevin has been heavily influenced by the past, his music could not be more of the now.

    “You can never tell whether people get what you’re trying to do or if they completely don’t get it,” Jay sighs. “I just hope that people are listening to the sound and aren’t really bothered about how long our hair is or how much we like Led Zeppelin, even though those things are true.”

    And if being retro is a crime, then why haven’t the hipster police been knocking on the doors of La Roux, or MGMT, or Cut Copy, or Surfer Blood? Why haven't Wolfmother been shaved down and thrown in the slammer? Why are The Mystery Jets still roaming free with their ‘80s hairstyles and cheap leisure suits? If you haven’t realised it yet, retro is the last refuge of the cutting edge. But if you’ve still got it in your head that Tame Impala are nothing more than musical pirates, then you’re in for a shock: “I can’t give anything away but if you heard the new stuff, you’d sound like an idiot if you said it sounded like it was from the ‘60s or ‘70s,” Jays revelates. “The way we’re using the computer program now and the synthesizers and stuff, it can’t understandably sound retro.”

    But hang on a minute, when Tame Impala’s debut album InnerSpeaker dropped this May gone by, it was met with near universal adoration from fans and pundits not only in this country but also in America (8.5 review on Pitchfork, song in the credits of new season of Entourage). So you might be wondering why they feel any shift in direction is necessary at all. Far be it from Kevin Parker and the gang to rest on their laurels though, and further be it from them to change just to silence the critics. Not that there were that many critics in the first place...

    “We’ve just been into a lot of synthesizer based music, a lot of electronic music from now and a lot of ‘70s-kind of Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream-esque sounds,” explains Jay of Tame Impala’s new sonic horizons. “I think it’s like proper forward-thinking now as opposed to just doing what we think sounds nice, which is what we used to do.

    “But we’re not making this sort of music because we’re sick of being called retro or anything like that. When we’ve been on the tour bus we’ve been listening to stuff like Air and Square Pusher more than we’ve been listening to Led Zeppelin or The Kinks or whatever, (so) we were like, ‘Hang on a second, we should do this! It sounds cool. Why not use drum samples and synths on every song?’” I think that “epiphany sound” just came back.

    So what exactly does the future hold in store for Tame Impala? No doubt they will return to America where they have been so warmly received and then it’ll be on to metamorphosing those vaguely brilliant sonic inspirations into full-bodied songs. But if Jay’s description of the new material is anything to go by, they still have a way to go in that department: “It’s gonna be a smorgasbord of acoustic guitars and electric guitars and synths and organs. You know that Mark Ronson song where she sings a bit in French and it’s got synth? Some of the chord progressions kind of sound like that, not like that song but that kind of space...pop.  Ken Lundgren did it in the ‘70s, that kind of space rock sound with laser-sounding synths. But it’s not fast and it’s not cheesy-sounding, its not like, ‘boom-tish, boom-tish’, it’s kind of really slow, kind of druggy synth pop. I dunno. It’s a similar vibe but with warm analogue synths instead of guitars.”

    If Kevin can whip even a quarter of Jay’s loosely descriptive palaver into some sort of musical offspring, then we’re quite sure Tame Impala will retain their mantle as the freshest young things in Australia. And then some.

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So there you have it, Tame Impala are the inaugural winners of Rip It Up’s Fresh 50. But we wanna know what you think! Who’s been left out of this prestigious list? Which up-and-coming Aussie bands do you think are putting out the freshest music at the moment? Or if you want to see how we got to this point, check out the whole Fresh 50 List from the start.

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