At dawn break this morning, and with little fanfare, the psychedelic rock wonders Tame Impala revealed a brand new, eight-minute long track entitled “Let It Happen”. Since Tame Impala released Lonerism in 2012, which became among the favorite albums of that year, I have been waiting desperately for the Australian band to release new material that I could rock out too. The most interesting part of Tame Impala’s music and specifically Kevin Parker’s writing style is that despite the seemingly iridescent instrumentation and his Lennon-esque vocals, it is really psych rock for insular souls who value being reclusive, hanging out inside their own heads.
Over the course of the 8-minute “Let It Happen”, we are treated to a marching beat assisting Parker’s increasingly unintelligible lyrics, as an aqueous wash tucked beneath paranoid bursts of synths ultimately becomes a fully guitar driven anthem before receding quickly into the horizon. By the end of the song you feel even deeper inside
Tame Impala will be releasing their third album at some point this year and dropped its first track in the form of the nearly eight-minute, hypnotic “Let it Happen.” Led with a krauty, martial beat and a glitchy breakdown that may have you thinking your computer froze, it’s pretty rad and an exciting first taste of what’s to come.
On the band’s first album, “Innerspeaker”, Parker sang that “solitude is bliss”, but I really don’t believe that it is a salve for him as much as it is a compulsion now. Representatives for the band have stressed that this new swirling synth-led adventure is not the first single from the band’s forthcoming album, the follow-up to 2012’s Lonerism, but instead a track just for fans.
Kevin Parker will admit to being an introvert and an obsessive. And that was true when Tame Impala was starting out merely as a mid-font festival concern and likened to Wolfmother with a straight face. So imagine the effect of spending the past three years playing to increasingly larger crowds and being told you’ve made a modern masterpiece. Parker probably heard “let it happen” countless times in the interim, a variation of “easy does it,” “keep it simple,” and other aphorisms that perfectionists pay to hear from therapists, gurus, Rick Rubin, and other people who command an outrageous hourly fee just to tell you the same shit your first-grade teacher did.
Parker has been praised as a classic rock voice with an electronic producer’s mind and that’s even more pronounced here, as “Let It Happen” seems to be editing itself in real time with all manner of filters, manipulated vocals, swirling ambience, and a startling midsection where he mashes down the looper button and holds it. He’s an expert at conveying the unexpected joy of beginner’s luck behind the boards. But there’s still the introvert and obsessive, singing, “all this running around trying to cover my shadow.” Yeah, people of this sort tend to have a distorted perspective on themselves: Even if Parker feels like he only goes backwards, people tend to overlook the next line—”every part of me says, go ahead.” As if anyone really needed to tell him, “let it happen.”
The Fat Angel Sings 