The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Tame Impala · written, performed and produced by Kevin Parker · mixed by Dave Fridmann · Modular · twelve tracks, about 52 minutes
Mode
Psychedelic pop in the manner of the late 1960s, heard through a modern saturated mix; euphoric haze carrying solitude
Mythos
The outsider at the edge of the crowd, the solitary at the railings of a public garden, evoked; a night of isolation framed by a command and a sunrise
Phase
Twelve tracks; a whispered command, a first summit third, a hinge near the middle, a stomp and a fragment late, a long song that rises in its second half, and a close that walks away
Presentation
Album; twelve tracks, about fifty-two minutes, first released in Australia on 5 October 2012; five long tracks hold about half its length
Register
One voice, double-tracked, compressed and set back; drums and bass, fuzz and phased guitars, analogue synthesisers carrying most leads, piano and keyboards; drums clipped by design
Scale
One sensibility among people: self-consciousness, anxiety and drift, the party and the crowd held as an outside, a city in title and cover
Governing Proposition
A one-man band, on its second record, trades the guitars of its first for synthesisers and the heavy psychedelic rock of its debut for pop melody, and builds out of a revived idiom a sound that is itself a condition: one voice set back and doubled inside bright, crowded, saturated music, the world heard from within a head. What the record discloses is solitude as a temperament, chosen and suffered at once, the self looking through glass at a social world it both wants and refuses. It discloses that truly and often with real height, but more as mood than as anatomy, and within one sensibility.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins with a command it will not keep. Under a pounding drum a voice whispers a loop, “be above it”, over and over, close to the ear and barely sung, before the song opens out. It is self-exhortation, the kind a man says to himself on the way into a room, and everything that follows is the failure to obey it. The record’s subject is stated before a verse is sung: a self talking to itself, telling itself to rise above the people it cannot reach.
Lonerism is Tame Impala’s second album, first released in Australia on 5 October 2012 by Modular: twelve tracks, about fifty-two minutes. It was written, performed and produced by Kevin Parker, who plays nearly every instrument on it, and mixed by Dave Fridmann; Jay Watson is co-writer of Apocalypse Dreams. Its cover is a photograph taken through the railings of the Jardin du Luxembourg, a crowd on the far side of the fence. The image states the record before a note is heard: the looker on one side, the people on the other, and the bars between.
The sound is the subject. One voice, double-tracked, compressed and set back in the mix, sits behind drums and bass, fuzz and phased guitars and analogue synthesisers that carry most of the leads. The arrangements are bright and crowded, and the voice is heard inside them as if from inside a head. Fridmann’s mix is loud and heavily limited; the drums clip by design and seem to press on the ear. A one-man band making a record called Lonerism is the subject enacted, and the form here is not a container for the songs but the condition they describe.
Movement II
Apocalypse Dreams is the first summit, placed third, and the record could not lose it. It climbs through a change of chords into a huge drum fill and then an ascending, phased coda that is real transport, the euphoria the record keeps reaching for and holding off. The drumming here, as in the swing of Be Above It, is a player’s, not a programmer’s: one man playing drums, bass, guitars and keyboards with the cohesion of a band, and the harmonic turns are deft. The transitions inside the song go on revealing their joins on return.
Mind Mischief, which follows, does the same thing at smaller scale. It runs on a groove and then, near its close, turns into a slower, unexpected passage that lifts the song off its groove and somewhere higher. These are the record’s chief goods after its making, and they come often: height on most of the long songs, of one family, a euphoric haze. Few of them reach terror or gravity. Its heights are the heights of a party heard from the next room, beautiful and not quite entered.
Not every part is required. Endors Toi, second, restates the opener’s manner in a busier key and stays level. Music to Walk Home By, fifth, drifts through its middle stretch, its long length permitted more than compelled. These are also the songs where the form is a container rather than an instrument: they would sit as easily on another psychedelic pop record, well made and in the record’s sound, but not carrying what it knows. The core of the sequence is strong; its joins are soft.
Movement III
The record turns near its middle, seventh, on its plainest and warmest song. Feels Like We Only Go Backwards is beauty of a simpler kind than the climbs before it, a melody that sounds remembered on first hearing, its writing economical. Its title is its admission. The self that was told to rise above it knows that it goes backwards instead, and says so without drama. The hinge of the record is not a climax but a confession made in a pleasant tune, which is the manner of the whole.
The titles say much of what the record knows: Why Won’t They Talk to Me?, Feels Like We Only Go Backwards, She Just Won’t Believe Me, Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control. They name the subject outright. What the record discloses can be put in a sentence: solitude here is not grief but a temperament, chosen and suffered at once, in which the self watches the social world through glass and both wants and refuses entry. That holds, and the sound says it more fully than the words.
It is also where the record stops. The words are few, thin and repetitive, and the condition is named more than anatomised. What the record means on the tenth hearing is close to what it means on the first; it deepens as sound, in phased keyboards, buried counter-melodies and half-heard words, not as sense. No order beyond the one sensibility is opened. The disclosure is true and stays close to mood, which is why the record holds its finding with conviction and does not take it further.
Movement IV
Keep On Lying, eighth, lays a recorded crowd beneath the music, voices and murmur heard under the band, and the record’s subject becomes audible: company as background. This is form as content, the plainest instance of what the record does throughout. The crowd beyond the railings on the cover is here under the song, present, heard, and not addressed. A party goes on, and the voice that sings over it is not part of it.
Then the record breaks its own persona. Elephant, ninth and the hardest-hitting song on it, is a glam-blues stomp with the voice brought forward and the swagger of a crowd-pleaser, elevation of the brute kind. It keeps the record’s law in sound, the same haze, the same pressed drums, but its confidence contradicts the self the rest of the record draws. It is necessary as a jolt and odd as a part. After it comes She Just Won’t Believe Me, under a minute, a fragment the sequence could lose.
Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control, eleventh, earns its length only in its second half, where it reaches a melancholy grandeur. The record’s range is moderate, from motorik push to piano ballad, and its palette is largely one palette; some of its coherence is one producer’s habit. The inheritance is plain and the record wears it openly: late 1960s psychedelic pop, the Beatles of 1966 and 1967 in the voice above all, Todd Rundgren’s one-man studio records, the Flaming Lips line Fridmann carried forward. The turn from the band’s first record was real; the path it turned onto was proven.
Movement V
Sun’s Coming Up is the compelled close. It begins as a piano song and dissolves into a long guitar coda heard as from a distance, and the singer leaves before the music does. The guitar goes on alone, fading as if the music were walking away, and the night of isolation ends without resolution: a sunrise heard from far off. The record opened on a whispered command to rise above, and it closes on a departure without words. The arc is real, and it is the record’s one frame of myth: the outsider at the edge of the crowd, the solitary at the railings, worn as mood rather than built.
The making is high. Arrangement is dense without confusion and the playing has a band’s cohesion though it is one man’s. The cost is in the master. It is crushed: transients clip, the loudest passages flatten to one level, and the dynamic arc the songs imply is partly lost to the medium. The voice keeps one register and one treatment throughout. That loudness belongs to the late years of the loudness war and is already heard by some as a mark of its period, and a record built on a revived idiom risks dating twice.
Fourteen years on the record is whole and in print, reissued at ten years, with Feels Like We Only Go Backwards and Elephant still widely heard and the record itself a fixed point of its decade’s listening. Its sound has been widely taken up, though the redirection is diffuse and shared with the band’s next record. It holds one sensibility completely, consciousness and the social world kept at bay, and not much beyond it. It is a lasting, finely made record of solitude among people, whose disclosure stays near mood and whose myth is evoked rather than built, and it ends with its music walking away from the crowd.
Act III · The Twelve
Twelve tracks in about fifty-two minutes, and the subtractive test bites more than once. Be Above It is required: its whispered loop and pounding drum set the self-exhortation the record then fails to live by. Apocalypse Dreams is the first summit and cannot go; Feels Like We Only Go Backwards is the hinge; Sun’s Coming Up is a compelled close. But Endors Toi restates the opener’s manner in a busier key, Music to Walk Home By drifts in its middle stretch, and She Just Won’t Believe Me, under a minute, is a fragment the sequence could lose. Elephant is necessary as a jolt and odd as a part. A strong core with soft joins: the figure clears the cap by a tenth.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: solitude here is not grief but a temperament, chosen and suffered at once, in which the self watches the social world through glass and both wants and refuses entry. The titles say much of it plainly; sound says more. The voice sits behind the band as if overheard inside a head, and the bright arrangements are a party heard from the next room; Keep On Lying lays a recorded crowd under the music. The finding holds. What holds the figure is that it stays close to mood: the words are thin and repetitive, the condition named more than anatomised, and no order beyond one sensibility is opened.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation comes often and is the record’s chief good after its making. Apocalypse Dreams climbs through a chord change into a huge drum fill and an ascending, phased coda that is real transport. Mind Mischief turns near its close into a slower, unexpected passage that lifts the song off its groove. Feels Like We Only Go Backwards is beauty of a plainer, warmer kind, a melody that sounds remembered on first hearing. The coda of Sun’s Coming Up reaches a melancholy grandeur; Elephant gives height of the brute kind. The heights are frequent but of one family, euphoric haze, and few reach terror or gravity; Endors Toi and stretches of Music to Walk Home By stay level.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Myth is evoked, not built. The figure is old and good: the outsider at the edge of the crowd, the solitary who looks through the railings at a public garden, a pattern with deep roots from the Romantic wanderer onward. The record gives it a particular face, a young man at a party he will not join, and a frame: it opens on a command to rise above and closes on a sunrise heard from far away, the night of isolation ending without resolution. That arc is real. What holds the figure is that the archetype is never made load-bearing: no figure acts, the frame is light, and the pattern is worn as mood rather than constructed.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The inheritance is late 1960s psychedelic pop, the Beatles of 1966 and 1967 heard most strongly, the voice especially; Todd Rundgren’s one-man studio records; and the Flaming Lips line that Fridmann carried into the 2000s. The swerve from the band’s first album is real: synthesisers replace guitars as the lead voice, heavy psychedelic rock becomes pop melody, and the mix is pushed to saturation so that the old sound is heard through a modern loudness. The stake was some: a band admired for guitar psychedelia changed its instruments on its second record. What holds it below the bar is that the wager was placed on a proven path: a revived idiom, a long line of one-man auteurs, and a fusion already in Fridmann’s own catalogue.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. Its subject is being alone among people, and the sound is that condition: a voice set back and doubled as if speaking to itself, arrangements bright and crowded around it, drums so compressed they seem to press on the ear. The crowd recording under Keep On Lying is form as content; the coda of Sun’s Coming Up, which leaves the singer behind and lets the guitar go on alone, is the record’s last word given without words. What holds it short of the higher rung is that Endors Toi, Elephant and Music to Walk Home By would sit as easily on another psychedelic pop record: there the form is a container, well made.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Evidence first, and fourteen years give some. The mixes repay return: phased keyboards, buried counter-melodies and half-heard words emerge on close listening, and listeners have returned to the record and its demos across the decade, helped by the reissue at ten years. The formal depth is genuine: the transitions inside Apocalypse Dreams and Mind Mischief go on revealing their joins. The semantic depth is thinner. The words are few and the condition they name is stated near the surface, so that what the record means on the tenth hearing is close to what it means on the first; it deepens as sound, not as sense, and no sustained tradition of reinterpretation has grown around it. A well real and of moderate depth.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The field is guitar and synthesiser pop of the early 2010s, then in a psychedelic revival. Intrinsic force is moderate: the record shows that a single maker can produce a full-band psychedelic record at the scale of the studio albums it loves, and that synthesisers can carry what guitars carried in 1967. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the sound, saturated drums, phased synthesisers and a voice set back, has been widely taken up in the psychedelic pop that followed, but the reach is diffuse, more a sound spread than particular records shown to turn on it, and much of it is shared with the band’s next record. It sits level with The Swerve and below Halcyon Digest at 7.9.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Fourteen years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the record exists as released, is in print, and was reissued at ten years. Presence is wide for its span: Feels Like We Only Go Backwards and Elephant remain widely heard, and the record is a fixed point of its decade’s listening, which places it at the head of its row. The surface fixed to its moment counts against it: the loudness of the master belongs to the late years of the loudness war and is already heard by some as a period mark, and a retro idiom risks dating twice. Survival over decades is not yet shown. It stands two tenths above Halcyon Digest, at 7.9, on wider presence.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and in places load-bearing. One man plays drums, bass, guitars and keyboards with a band’s cohesion; the drumming especially, the fills in Apocalypse Dreams and the swing of Be Above It, is a player’s, not a programmer’s. Arrangement is dense without confusion, the harmonic turns in Apocalypse Dreams and Mind Mischief are deft, and the melodic writing of Feels Like We Only Go Backwards is economical. The costs are real. The master is crushed: transients clip and the loudest passages flatten to one level, so that the dynamic arc the songs imply is partly lost. Two tenths under m b v, at 8.5, whose guitar treatment bears more of the load.
Score: 8.3 / 10
One law governs most of the record: a single voice set back inside a bright, saturated sound, the world heard from within. Take the two most distant elements: Elephant, a glam-blues stomp with the voice brought forward and a crowd-pleaser’s swagger, and Sun’s Coming Up, a piano song that dissolves into a long, distant coda. Both obey the law in sound, keeping the voice in the same haze and pressing the drums, but Elephant strains it in spirit: its confidence contradicts the self the record otherwise draws. Range is moderate, from motorik push to piano ballad, and the palette is largely one palette. Narrowness is not coherence, and some of this coherence is one producer’s habit. The law holds, with one strain.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held fully, as self-consciousness, anxiety and drift. The social world is present as the thing kept at bay: the party, the crowd under Keep On Lying, the woman who will not believe, the people who will not talk. A city is present through title and cover more than through song. These orders are held by one sensibility and integrated by it, and within that scale the record is complete. Labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent, and the social is held only as an outside. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.3, then The Sublime and The Imperishable at 8.1 and The Living Form at 8.0. A making in which one man plays the whole band with cohesion, dense arrangement kept clear and deft harmonic turns, though the master is crushed; height on most of the long songs, from the climb of Apocalypse Dreams to the coda of Sun’s Coming Up; a record whole, in print and widely heard after fourteen years; and a sound that is itself the condition it describes, a voice set back inside a crowded brightness and a crowd recorded under Keep On Lying.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: consciousness held fully, the social world held only as an outside and a city through title and cover, with labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order absent. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.2, the outsider at the railings evoked and worn as mood, with no figure acting and a light frame. Then The Bottomless Well at 7.4, a record that deepens as sound on return but not as sense, its few words naming the condition near the surface.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.1, The Unconcealment at 7.7, The Swerve at 7.6, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.2 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Archetypal Deep, 7.2, and at The Bottomless Well, 7.4, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, three tenths short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and well short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the album as first released in Australia by Modular on 5 October 2012, twelve tracks in their original order, about fifty-two minutes; written, performed and produced by Kevin Parker, who plays nearly every instrument, and mixed by Dave Fridmann; Jay Watson is co-writer of Apocalypse Dreams. Later reissues, among them the tenth-anniversary editions, are evidence for survival, not the object. Judged from knowledge of the recording and its reception; no recording or lyric sheet was in hand, running times are approximate, and the words are paraphrased. Songs are cited by title, and the only lyric quoted is the whispered loop of the opening track. Facts that could not be verified, among them the release dates in other territories, the places and dates of recording, the photographer of the cover, the subject of the words of Sun’s Coming Up, the awards and year-end lists, and the uses of the songs in film and advertising, are not given.