Apocalypse Dreams. Tame Impala. 2012. Modular.

 The good news is that the Australian recording artist Kevin Parker—who releases records under the name Tame Impala—is as adept at reinterpreting twentieth century pop music for a twenty-first century listenership as any artist has been since the Beatles went about refining the art form roughly sixty years ago. Apocalypse Dreams is about entropy of the will and the attempt, though futile, to impose transcendence onto a string of disappointments that has eaten its way into, and has come to dominate, a life. The record’s production shimmers with a brilliance suggestive of what could be a pop style typical of our technology-pervasive age. There’s little commitment to emotional expression in Parker’s singing voice. Nor does he fully disengage by way of cool; his talent falls somewhere in between. A gift for melody, and of pop sensibilities, allows you to register the tension of the lyric, and a comic twist in the final verse elevates the material into shared company with Blondie’s Atomic and the Cars’ Let the Good Times Roll.

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