Five years is a fair amount of time to let slip by when you’re in the music industry. Yet that’s what the gap between Currents and The Slow Rush has allowed. The pressure to constantly stay relevant while saying something new yet also still familiar to one’s fickle fanbase is overwhelming. At the very least, Kevin Parker a.k.a. Tame Impala is not a woman. Because he might have had a much harder time coming back and being instantaneously embraced (look what happened to the likes of Ciara or JoJo–no one has paid much attention to either despite both releasing stellar albums since their “heyday”). At the same time, it always seems as though white males in the music industry are the most petrified of all of aging–of the existential crisis that comes with midlife and asking the same question that LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy did long ago (in 2002): “Am I losing my edge?” Okay, so he didn’t ask it so much as declare it with, “I’m losing my edge/To all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin/I’m losing my edge to the art school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s.”
With Tame Impala’s unabashed reflection on time–its simultaneous endlessness and rapidity depending on what spectrum of life you’re on–it’s only right that The Slow Rush should commence with a measure of it, “One More Year.” As though to say, yes, another year has passed and little has changed. Yet it is this theoretically “small” unit demarcating the passage of one’s life that turns into decades–so quickly adding up all at once and seemingly out of nowhere. A dissection of the once novel feeling of musical success and the touring rigmarole that comes with it, Parker philosophically analyzes, “‘Cause what we did, one day, on a whim/Has slowly become all we do/I never wanted any other way to spend our lives/I know we promised we’d be doing this ‘til we die/Ooh, now I fear we might.” Suddenly seeing all the years stretched out before him playing out exactly the same way for exactly the same (often puerilely selfish) reasons, Parker sounds horrified (even if resignedly so) at the prospect. Still, he sardonically declares, fine, he’ll do it all again for “one more year.” Until finally there are none left.
It is perhaps this sense of time’s weight that at last prompted Parker to marry his semi-longtime girlfriend, Sophie Lawrence (not the romantic subject that so clearly got shafted on 2015’s Currents–no, that was Melody Prochet). So it is that he announces, “I’m about to do something crazy” (because any man would have to be crazy to commit, right?), adding, “No more delayin’…/We’ll be lovers ‘til the end of time/I see it now/I see just how you’re so right.” One supposes that’s where the title “Instant Destiny” comes in–if a man finally wills it so, anything is “destiny.” Let’s just hope Parker doesn’t decide to “unwill” it at any point, for Sophie’s sake. The third track and lead single, “Borderline” (slightly reworked since its release last year), picks up the tempo with a more frenetic pace that mirrors time’s own unstoppability. Written in 2017 during the Woolsey fires in Los Angeles, Parker processes the ephemerality not just of humans, but the nature that surrounds them, lamenting, “We’re on the borderline/Caught between the tides of pain and rapture/Then I saw the time/Watched it speedin’ by like a train.”
Speeding by with enough force to make Parker see the moment has come for some “Posthumous Forgiveness.” Specifically to his father, who left the scene when Parker was a young child in the wake of divorce. As one of the most unique songs on the album for its sonic bifurcation, the split mirrors Parker’s own changing emotion over the course of, you guessed it, time. In the early stages of the loss (which became literal in 2009 when his father died of cancer), Parker stews, “And you could store an ocean in the holes/In any of the explanations that you gave/And while you still had time, you had a chance/But you decided to take all your sorrys to the grave.” Even still, Parker would give anything for a few more minutes with his patriarch, rueing that it took him becoming an adult to see things from another point of view as he remarks, “You were runnin’ for cover/Doin’ like any other/Fallin’ out with a lover/You didn’t know that I suffered/What a thing to discover/There was time to recover.” The rhythmic repetition at a certain point in the track connotes an almost self-soothing technique for Parker, the boy left alone to his own devices–music ultimately being his sole and best coping mechanism. Ah yes, Daddy issues are just as damaging to men as they are to women.
And, speaking of self-soothing, the title of the subsequent song, “Breathe Deeper,” seems to offer more assurance, both to himself and his listener as he chants over the funk-laden melody, “If you think I couldn’t hold my own, believe me, I can/Believe me, I can, believe me, I can.” Like a psychedelic Little Engine That Could, Parker is determined to prove that he’s still got it after so much time spent away from the spotlight. Which only means there’s been added stress on him to prove his “genius.” It’s something of a dichotomous show of confidence in comparison to self-deprecating lyrics like, “It might be time to face it/It ain’t as fun as it used to be, no/You’re goin’ under/You ain’t as young as you used to be” on “It Might Be Time.” With another whimsical fade out that makes it seem like a different song entirely (for a similar effect to “Posthumous Forgiveness”), “Breathe Deeper” is an upbeat offering in all of its many transformations.
Getting back to the core of what the record is about (as further iterated by the overflowing sand in an empty but bright room on the album cover, designed by Neil Krug)–time–Tame Impala gives us “Tomorrow’s Dust,” a trippy, acoustic guitar-heavy cut that exhorts its listener to dispense with the past. The ultimate source of emotional baggage that only serves to weigh down as one is hurtled into their future. For, as it is said, “Time waits for no man.” Or, as Kevin Parker puts it, “And in the air of today is tomorrow’s dust/There’s no use trying to relate to that old song/And no use biding your time if the bell is tolled.” Australian poetry at its finest.
Keeping the time motif well-oiled is “On Track,” a slow burn of psychedelia filled with lush piano notes that soundtrack Parker’s ethereal vocals. An undeniable rumination on the increasing amount of days and years slipping away as Parker “works on new material” for an expected fourth record, he tongue-in-cheekly describes in that deadpan tone, “And if I’m counting days, dream fruition ain’t what it’s looking like/But strictly speaking, I’m still on track/Strictly speaking, I’m holding on/One other minor setback/But strictly speaking, I’m still on track/And all of my dreams are still in sight/Strictly speaking, I’ve got my whole life.” But oh, how rapidly a life can dissipate when one is loafing around waiting for “the muse.” Even so, part of Parker’s process in feeling the motivation to create involves letting himself feel like enough of a deadbeat to move forward with something. As he phrased it, “Part of the thing about me starting an album is that I have to feel kind of worthless again to want to make music.” Yet as he’s gotten older, one of the few advantages has appeared to be caring just a little less about meeting other people’s demands and deadlines, concluding the song with the lines, “The world ain’t waitin’ for ya’, nothin’ to lose it over/I just kept getting older, the rest gets easy.”
The rhythm picks up again on another single, “Lost in Yesterday,” an epic about the nature of letting go, and how doing so is key to moving on with one’s life (though, let’s be honest, for most men, this is simply a reason to justify being a cad to women who they think should let their behavior roll off their jilted back). Opening with a Dickensian approach to nostalgia, Parker touches on the propensity we have to romanticize certain periods in our life which we found rather abhorrent in the present as he sings, “When we were livin’ in squalor, wasn’t it heaven?/Back when we used to get on it four out of seven/Now even though that was a time I hated from day one/Eventually, terrible memories turn into great ones.” Yet clinging to these false images is a detriment to embracing the sands of time as the grains pelt you like a desert storm. In order to let it “immerse” you rather than whip you, Parker suggests, “You’re gonna have to let it go someday/You’ve been diggin’ it up like Groundhog Day/’Cause it might’ve been somethin’, don’t say/’Cause it has to be lost in yesterday.” Whether you acknowledge it or not, it’s lost anyway, so you might as well free up some of your psyche for the present and future.
Still, when it comes to a love that’s still new, thinking about anything beyond the present can be a challenge, as presented on the jaunty “Is It True,” a song Parker deliberately chose to write within an eight-hour time frame to achieve the effect he wanted. With such a concept in mind, Parker stated of the track, “Young love is uncertain. Let’s not talk about the future. We don’t know what it holds. I hope it’s forever but how do I know? When all is said and done, all you can say is ‘we’ll see.’” What a fucking male douchebag sentiment that infers very little progress in the way of all the so-called growth Parker has been referencing throughout the album thus far. The title of the song itself is a question asked by his significant other with regard to whether their love is, which would entail that it could last if it’s true in the now. Yet as we’ve all experienced, what’s true in the present does not necessarily remain so as time moves forward. Riffing off the story of “The Zen Master, The Boy & The Horse” immortalized by Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Gust Avrakotos in Charlie Wilson’s War, Parker repeats in response to how their love might play out, “We’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll see.” What a goddamn copout.
“It Might Be Time” is a bit of one as well, with Parker going back to that “losing my edge” sentiment. Indeed, Parker’s inner monologue consists of such excuses for avoiding putting out new music and touring again as, “You ain’t as cool as you used to be, no/You won’t recover” and “Nobody knows what you’ve come here for, no/You’re goin’ under/They roll their eyes when you’re at the door.” Of course, no one has done that to The Slow Rush, with most cradling it like a dear and much needed security blanket. Especially those fans who have waited so long. Now, at last a “Glimmer” in their lusterless lives. This track itself serving as the shortest on the record at two minutes, eight seconds with a 70s porn-esque flavor (one of Parker’s favorite bands is Supertramp, after all) that provides backing support to the repetition of the phrase, “I just want a glimmer of hope.” Parker has given his listeners just that with his latest work. And as the song fades into “One More Hour” (a fitting bookend that ties right back to the opener, “One More Year”), Parker almost makes us believe it could be quite another bit of time before he releases something else, otherwise why would he work so hard to leave us with something so dramatic and lengthy (topping out at just over seven minutes, though that’s still no match for Lana Del Rey’s “Venice Bitch”)?
Sweeping and grandiose, “One More Hour” has the sonic tone of something The Beatles would have come up with for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or Abbey Road (perhaps it sounds most like “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” meets “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window”). Reflecting this time instead on the final hour of “one more year,” the coda to The Slow Rush is much different from the one on Currents, “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” (which yes, Rihanna also made her own on 2016’s ANTI). On this, he cynically admitted, “Feel like a brand new person, but you’ll make the same old mistakes. In contrast to this more fatalistic surrender, Parker sings on “One More Hour,” “All your voices said you wouldn’t last a minute, babe/One more hour and you know your life is one to share/Just a minute, baby, right before we go through here/All these people said we wouldn’t last a minute, dear I’m with you and I can roll into another year.” So it is that his new love has replaced his old (the one he parted with on Currents). That’s just the nature of how time works, one supposes–rendering some people day old bread and others shiny and fresh.
Regardless of some of his vexing stances on the record, The Slow Rush is a slow burn right into your heart (maybe that’s why it had to be released on Valentine’s Day). And even if he has quote unquote lost his edge, there aren’t many other male musicians in the game right now who stand out half as much. Plus, regardless of age, being an artist isn’t something one can just turn off merely because it’s “a young man’s game.” You do it because you have to. So Parker has.
