Music: If you can call it that: Tame Impala

This music sucks.  What I listened-to from the group Architecture in Helsinki their earlier work, "Desert Island," sounds l+k an intertw+nment of Trance, Caribbean throw-in, and Abba — a fatal combination.  The second segment sounded trancy again.

I just coudn't go on with it.  The band Tame Impala new release starts with a more pop inflection, with driving drum rhythms, of course machine-produced "keyboardings", graciously muffled vocals.  The song I checked out for this group is "Elephant" and it's part of "Lonerism" (of which in North America we've had qu+t enuff in this last week with the Bat-Driven mass murderer in Aurora, Colorado).

They're too are part of the same online umbrella presentation webs+t, Modular. Rather ostentatiously, they say of themselves:

1:41 / 3:31

Tame Impala - Lonerism  

October 5, 2012 

Sonically Lonerism is a quantum leap forward for the band, the seeds of which were sown shortly after mixing of Innerspeaker had been completed. Again recorded and produced almost entirely by Kevin Parker in studios, planes, hotels and homes around the world, and mixed by the trailblazing Dave Fridmann, it's a sound not so much reinvented as completely redrafted and stretched way, way out.  

Lonerism's most apparent advance is in it's synthesizers - there's swathes of them cutting melancosmic shapes across almost every track. There's still the searing guitar lines, bouldering drums, free bass and of course Parker's voice, but now there's heavily mournful pads and sunshine lead lines from an army of analogue explorers in the mix. 

You can click up "Elephant" here.

Another of the modular groups is Cécile & Refleksie whose "First Sparkle" which I listened-to as long as I coud stretch my tolerance.

Altogether a dated musical aesthetic, derivative, imitative—in just such a way to make a lot of money from their world tours.  Shades of Abba.

— Musikos, refWrite Backpage music spotter, columnist, and reviewer