Tame Impala's Music Style and Influences

Tame Impala's Kevin Parker said he has a "Fetish" for Shoegaze and Sugary Pop Music

Tame Impala's music style and influences

Tame Impala arose in 2007 as a Kevin Parker home-recording venture in this period and he posted various tracks on Myspace. This brought interest from various labels and at last, he marked an overall arrangement with the autonomous Modular Recordings in July 2008. Since then, he's on a streak of providing the very best of music to its admirers.https://fadewblogs.blogspot.com/2021/01/miamis-top-10-car-accident-law-attorneys.html

Musical style:

Kevin Parker's choice to make the music for Tame Impala in the studio without help from anyone else is an aftereffect of Parker liking "the kind of music that is the result of one person constructing an awesome symphony of sound. You can layer your own voice 700 times for half a second if you want, and I just love that kind of music".

However, Parker needs to make an interpretation of his music to a live setting with the band, and the band doesn't play the melodies until they have been recorded. "The only jamming that's done as a band is done a long time after the song is recorded for the sake of the live environment. It's good for us because we can take a song that's been recorded and do what we want to it: slow it down, speed it up, make it 10 seconds or 10 minutes long. It gives us a lot of freedom."

Kevin Parker's process for making music is "I’ll have a sudden, spontaneous vision of a song, have all the parts mapped out in mind, and do my best to record it as quickly as I can. I’ll find my eight-track and do a quick demo of just the riff, or a verse or a chorus. The song will go for like 30 seconds. I’ll have a whole bunch of them [demos] and then I’ll just choose which ones to make into full songs".

Kevin Parker also said, "Usually I am sufficiently motivated to think of new songs every day, but I usually forget them. I seem to get an emotional kick out of sensing feelings of general desperation or hopelessness, whether it's me or someone near me or someone in a movie or anything. It's really difficult to sit down and force yourself to write a song, and that forced nature usually comes out in the song so I just have to wait until they come to me."

Musical influences:

Tame Impala's music is mostly influenced by 1960s and 1970s psychedelic rock, also 90s Shoegaze. Kevin Parker said,
 I have a fetish for extremely sugary pop and shoegaze music
Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine have influenced Tame Impala's music with their contrasting combination of loud guitars and ethereal melodies.  Parker said he has "always been in love with the wall of sound as employed by Slowdive" and he tries to capture that "melancholy dreamy feel". Parker attempts to fuse this equilibrium into his own music. 

If I was singing, I wouldn't be able to match the tone of the instruments, which is really crunchy. The instruments are quite sonically brutal, but the voice is really soft, and I think that kind of resonates with people. It's kind of like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, where it's really brutal sounding, but kind of beautiful at the same time

Jay Watson, a band member of Pond, and live drummer of Tame Impala described that some of Tame Impala's music has shoegaze guitar sound, but not in a shoegazey manner.

Electronic Music is another influence for Tame Impala. Kevin Parker has electronically utilized rock instrumentation, saying "The way we do music, it's organic, but it's meant to be quite repetitive and hypnotic, almost in a kind of electronic nature. Using our playing as though it was a living sample".

A heavy portion of Innerspeaker is a pitch-shifted guitar tone that many people have mistaken for a synth. Parker has cleared this by saying "I had a few obsessions when recording Innerspeaker. One was to make the guitars sound like synths and drums sound like drum samples and pretty much anything except guitars and drums. I'm obsessed with confusing people as to the origin of a sound."

Parker was enlivened to take up different inventive undertakings at a youthful age, saying:

I used to draw a lot when I was very young, and I used to get the most immense feeling of satisfaction from finishing a picture and looking back at it, even though I wasn't actually that good. When I started playing music I got the same feeling from making a song, even if it was just a few noises or drum patterns put together. It was all about the buzz from making something from nothing. Music always affected me greatly as a listener anyway, usually from listening to music in my dad's car or listening to him play guitar

Parker has additionally expressed that Supertramp (an English rock band formed in London in 1970), one of his most favorite bands, is a significant impact on the melodic style of Tame Impala. In spite of their distinction in sound, he believes he is in every case fairly "channeling Supertramp". He has said that listening to the Bee Gees on mushrooms enlivened him to change the sound of the music he was making on Currents.

Written By: Em Marianne


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