Tame Impala's Kevin Parker said he has a "Fetish" for Shoegaze and Sugary Pop Music
Musical style:
Musical influences:
I have a fetish for extremely sugary pop and shoegaze 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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