'I heard about a whirlwind that's coming round/ it's gonna carry off all that isn't bound'

'I'm a leaf on a windy day/pretty soon I'll be blown away/ how long will the wind blow? Until I die.'

Tame Impala are often described as a 'revivalist' band, the implication being that if your vocal timbre sounds like John Lennon through a Leslie cabinet you’re ripping off the Beatles. To paraphrase Roger Waters: give a man a Les Paul guitar and he doesn’t become Eric Clapton – give a man a Hofner bass and he doesn’t become Paul McCartney. To me, what separates Tame Impala from their many, many imitators is that rather than rehashing a static, wax museum replica of a specific sound, Kevin Parker takes a wide range of sounds from various decades and genres and ties them together with his own unique songwriting, production, and lyrical personality.

I would argue that rather than being a pale copy of the Beatles circa 1966, Tame Impala is the latest inheritor of a different legacy started by Brian Wilson, another great 60’s songwriting visionary. What Kevin Parker shares with Brian Wilson, and few others, is a keen sense of how to make psychedelic music relatable. A profound psychedelic experience isn't about the walls melting or seeing dancing pink elephants or any of the usual tropes hack TV writers (or hack songwriters) use to portray a character 'tripping out', it's about experiencing a fully-realised, inescapable sense of one’s place in the universe. Many musicians have tried to translate this experience, with some pretty average results (I won’t name names, but there’s some dross out there). Where Tame Impala stand out in comparison with their psychedelically-inclined peers is that Kevin Parker’s lyrics are very direct and the emotions behind his vocal delivery are clear. His songs are free to wander off in any direction he wants because the listener has a lifeline to hold on to. Listening to music touted as ‘psychedelic’ can often feel like listening to a description of someone else’s dream - utterly tedious, regardless of what is going on in the other person’s mind. Kevin Parker has an uncanny way of putting you inside his head, wherever his music takes you. Brian Wilson, when he was writing his own lyrics, had a similar emotional directness that anchored his music. The best example of this is Till I Die, one of the most emotionally bleak, beautifully recorded songs ever committed to tape.