This record’s so bright he’s gotta wear shades

Tame Impala aka Kevin Parker in action at the Gold Coast’s Big Day Out.
Source: News Limited

ROCK

Tame Impala, Currents

(Universal) ****

It’s almost a shame that the third album from Kevin Parker, aka Tame Impala, drops in the depths of winter. Much of it feels bathed in a last-rays-of-summer golden glow.

It is also his best work since the excellent 2008 EP with which he announced himself to the world, despite all those rave reviews for the two full-length albums since.

Much has changed since that first EP. When it arrived “psychedelic’’ was a mostly underground practice: these days anyone with a vaguely offbeat melody and some colourful cover art seems to attract the label.

Parker has gone his own way, as revealed by the dazzling opening track, Let It Happen, all 7:47 of it released as a single earlier this year. Out with guitars and in with synthesisers and a precise drum machine, or at least someone playing like a precise drum machine, and a melody that pours like liquid.

We had a hint to the way this album would go with Parker’s tracks in collaboration with Mark Ronson on Ronson’s Uptown Funk album this year. So it proves, working in a field that’s closer to French bands like Air and Phoenix, smoother, less rock, more pop, with melodies that feel stronger, like they are constructed with more attention to detail.

The Moment is a mid-paced tune you could imagine people dancing to under a mirror ball on a Friday night.

It is not disco but it is certainly dance music, the kind of electronic drum beat and fingerclicks you would find on a Style Council or Soul II Soul record in the ’80s.

Yes I’m Changing is like its melancholy B-side, with Parker delivering a farewell to a lover and the kind of emotional honesty (“They say people never change but that’s bullshit’’) I’ve never noticed in his lyrics before.

There’s more of this on Eventually (“I know I will be happier and I know you will too’’). The drum machine is right up front as the music walks a line between monster riff and delicate synths — by which time you realise you are inside an album that sounds like Tame Impala yet feels different to anything they have done before.

There’s a gradual but inexorable build to Currents. A tantalising synthesiser fragment, Gossip feels like it has found its way from a Stevie Wonder album circa ’73, then rapidly cuts to another dancefloor pop tune, The Less I Know the Better.

Part of the appeal of so much music that gets the “psych’’ label is the carefree feeling of childhood extended and adult cares delayed.

There’s none of that here. On songs such as Past Life adulthood rudely intrudes and can’t be shaken. There’s even a song called Because I’m a Man, sweet and soulful yet careful and deliberate too.

While Reality in Motion has some of the woozy quality of the earlier albums, you know this isn’t just some carefree child daubing on colourful paints for effect. You can see it even in the song titles: Love Paranoia; New Person, Same Old Mistakes.

Reality strikes. But it has been good for Parker’s music, presented here in sharper focus than we’ve heard from him before. These are songs that can handle that focus.

Noel Mengel

Pale New Sun by Chris Stockley

ROCK

Chris Stockley, Pale New Sun

(Aztec) ***1/2

Guitarist Chris Stockley has been a key player in the places where rock meets country in Australia, as a member of Axiom and The Dingoes. He’s a sublimely tasteful guitarist, as captured on those two classic Dingoes albums from the ’70s, but here he shows his skills as a songwriter and a singer. Those who love The Dingoes will find much to enjoy here, from the Stones-in-country-mode tunes, such as Stone in My Shoe, which also features some of Stockley’s distinctive harmonica, to the ‘60s R & B groove of Sanctuary and the lonesome bar-room blues of Ghost Town. Stockley’s lived-in voice suits the material, especially the album’s standout track, One Step Ahead of the Rain, a pulsing country-rock tune that could have come from the pen of Don Walker or Paul Kelly. Stockley works with a fine band, including James Black as producer, bassist Joe Creighton and Joe Camilleri on sax. For evidence of Stockley’s place on the top shelf of Australian guitar players, check The Consoler, a lead guitar masterclass in putting emotion ahead of showboating.

Noel Mengel

CLASSICAL

Antony Gray, Poulenc: Complete Music For Solo Piano

(ABC Classics) ****1/2

Australian pianist Antony Gray is shaping up to be our marathon man of recorded piano music. Having completed Malcolm Williamson’s set (now listed in 1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die, with a Saint-Saëns set in the offing and this new collection from French composer Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), Gray is earning a place in the record books. Poulenc might have said he didn’t care if his piano music was discarded but as Gray shows, this five-disc package is part of a treasury exemplifying Poulenc’s refined compositional style and oozing his individual melodic inventions. Whether in short, snappy numbers such as Bourrée or Presto, in his cheeky “take’’ on a Chopin Prelude, gently rolling themes of Novelette, the facility of piano transcriptions of sonatas for wind instruments or The Story of Babar the Little Elephant, Poulenc is ever inventive, witty and whimsical. Gray’s clarity and vitality animates and honours this music from a French quarter seldom so honoured in this antipodean corner.

Patricia Kelly

Low Fidelity (Songs by Request Volume 1) by Rob Snarski

ROCK

Rob Snarski, Low Fidelity

(Teardrop Records) ***1/2

This is the place where songs by Joni Mitchell (River), Spiritualized (You Lie, You Cheat) and Lou Reed (Satellite of Love) can cosy up together. Australian vocalist Snarski (Chad’s Tree, The Blackeyed Susans) always loved low-fidelity home recordings that capture an honesty that’s more difficult to reproduce in a studio. But if he didn’t tell you these songs were recorded on an iPhone (and later tweaked in a studio by Shane O’Mara), you probably wouldn’t know. The 18 tracks were fan requests, ranging from
Wild is the Wind (recorded by Nina Simone and David Bowie) to Lee Hazlewood’s Come On Home To Me. Timeless tunes like Wichita Lineman and Bridge Over Troubled Water work fine stripped of their big arrangements, but it’s when Snarski digs outside the top 40 that the album soars, whether it’s Fred Neil’s ’60s classic The Dolphins, the Chad’s Tree song The Flood Johanna, or a devastating take on Pulp’s Babies. Despite the digital domain, Low Fidelity feels more Polaroid than Instagram. And I miss Polaroid.

Noel Mengel

ROCK

Rickie Lee Jones, The Other Side of Desire

(Cooking Vinyl) ****

Rickie Lee Jones is wearing a knowing grin on the cover of this fine, spirited album, which testifies that at 60, she’s in a happy space, despite being too scarred and eccentric for a pop mainstream that adored her in 1979. Christmas in New Orleans finds Jones carousing with old friends at a bar in her adopted home city, celebrating survival and looking back in wonderment at the time when she and Tom Waits were the hottest bohemian couple on the planet. It’s been a long time since Jones has recorded anything as playful and irresistible as Jimmy Choos, which swoops, swoons and teases like her breakthrough hit Chuck E’s in Love. The sounds of New Orleans surface throughout the album, from the Cajun waltz of Valtz De Mon Pere (Lovers’ Oath) to the Fats Domino-style piano boogie of J’ai Connais Pas. Elsewhere, she stretches out on languid, atmospheric ballads (Infinity, Feet on the Ground) and ghostly sound collages (Finale:A Spider in the Circus of the Falling Star). Long-time fans will love this collection. And Jones is right when she says Jimmy Choos would sound great on radio.

David Costello

POP

Robin Gibb, Saved By the Bell

(Warner) ****

Everything about Robin Gibb’s life was accelerated. And distinctive, right from the first songs he wrote for The Bee Gees to becoming a worldwide chart-topper with The Bee Gees at 17. He was barely 20 when he went solo with the 1969 hit Saved By The Bell and the Robin’s Reign album. Robin soon rejoined his brothers and a second solo album, known as Sing Slowly Sisters, was unreleased until now, three years after his death, as part of this three-CD set. Robin’s interest in historical settings and orchestral pop could be heard on songs like Lamplight, from 1969’s Bee Gees album Odessa, and these tracks continue on that path with often lush and sometimes unsettling orchestral pop. Robin’s Reign is good if uncommercial but the Sing Slowly Sisters disc is the one that really soars, with tunes as distinctive as Robin’s unmistakable voice, from jaunty pop (Life) to folk (Sky West and Crooked) and delicately orchestrated ballads (Irons On The Fire)
. The brothers together created something close to genius but for an insight into Robin’s singular talents, this is a treasure trove.

Noel Mengel

COUNTRY

Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard, Django and Jimmie

(Legacy/Sony) ****

These two grizzled outlaws aren’t ready to hang up their holsters just yet. In fact, Nelson, 82, and Haggard, 78, are in rude high spirits as they swap tall stories and burnish legends on an energetic and frequently funny collaboration. Naturally there is some substance abuse in the air. When the old friends whoop it up on It’s All Going To Pot, they are referring to the beleaguered planet and the $ 100 in Nelson’s pocket. There are more road high jinks laid bare in Missing Ol’ Johnny Cash which reveals that the Man in Black kept his pills in a paper sack and once set fire to hotel curtains to keep warm. Producer Buddy Cannon keeps proceedings moving swiftly as the legends pay tribute to each other (Unfair Weather Friend, The Only Man Wilder Than Me), reference their musical heroes (Django and Jimmie), and score with a taut upbeat take on Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. Here’s hoping they survive long enough to do this again.

David Costello

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