Looking beyond the potentially write-offable story of a student-teacher boyhood fantasy, the new video from Tame Impala is pretty amazing. It feels like an homage to MTV and teenage boys everywhere, and the music grips the viewer to the point of physical restraint.
It treads familiar ground, but it’s new and it recalls a millions things: The Wall, Van Halen, Basketball Diaries, Dazed and Confused, Dead Poets Society, Yellow Submarine…
All week long we’ve been counting down our staff’s picks for the best albums of 2012. Today, on one of the last workdays of the year, we reveal the top of our list.
When Hidden Track was started in 2006 there were plenty of sites dedicated to indie rock and a slew of sites devoted to improvisational and classic rock bands, but few blogs (and bands for that matter) bridged the gap between the forms. That’s where we came in and five years later the results of our list shows that’s still where our staff’s interests lie.
Thanks for following along all week. We now present our Top 5 Albums of 2012…
5) Dr. John – Locked Down
Key Tracks: Locked Down, Ice Age, Eleggua… aw heck, they’re all amazing.
Sounds Like: Dan Auerbach as Marty McFly, Dr John as Marvin Berry; a time-traveling Delorean and one funky-as-hell Enchantment Under the Sea dance.
The Skinny: If you had a time machine, would you go back to save the world from some certain evil? Would you ensure yourself riches beyond your wildest imagination? Or would you use it to get down to history’s greatest musicians in their prime? Dan Auerbach may very well have a time machine because the Dr. John he’s produced on Locked Down is a revelation of past greatness in the here and now. The album is a swampy, dark Dr. John voodoo funk with Auerbach’s greasy fingerprints all over it, an embarrassment of musical riches, each track its own adventure. As throwback as it sounds, what’s remarkable is how modern and relevant it feels – time machine or not, Dr John & Dan Auerbach have delivered an album for the ages.
When you have to travel halfway around the globe, it takes a bit of advanced planning when you want to line up a tour, so just weeks removed from wrapping up a mini U.S. club run, Tame Impala have announced that they will be returning to North America early next year.The Australian psych-rock band, who released their highly recommended sophomore effort Lonerism
If you’re not into a night with a psych-rock act, then maybe you’ll be interested in hitting one of these recently announced tours…
Here’s the full list of Tame Impala 2013 Tour Dates…
Tame Impala, the brilliant psychedelic band from Perth on the West Coast of Australia, returned to Boston last night at the Royale in support of their recent release Lonerism. The much heralded band continues to attract followers as evidenced by the entirety of their current fall tour in the United States being completely sold out.
[Kevin Parker]
Although a relatively early show even with opening act The Amazing from Sweden, Tame Impala came on around 8:00pm and seemingly reached deep into the night skies with often dark, expansive, spacey & spellbinding sounds. Yet, just as a star is in a galaxy with millions of others, the closest is still light years away, and that is often the feeling one gets with bandleader and guitarist Kevin Parker. With albums named Lonerism and Innerspeaker and songs such as Solitude is Bliss, I guess it should be no surprise that there’s often a sense of singularity with Parker’s hypnotic guitar riffs and frequently incomprehensible vocals. Often times with a back turned to the crowd, or gazing off into distance, Parker is still able to engage and connect with the crowd especially during fan favorites such as Solitude is Bliss, Feels Like We Only Go Backwards, and It Is Not Meant To Be.
As the year-end lists begin their annual avalanche onto the blogosphere, one of the albums that has been getting mentions that you may have missed is Innerspeaker,
