In a few weeks’ time, the book Psychedelia and Other Colours is due to be published. The work of the academic Rob Chapman, it is a fantastic, exhaustive history of the genre: comprehensive but gripping, packed with eye-opening period detail and with a brilliant analysis of everything from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the oeuvre of the Crocheted Doughnut Ring. But it ends around 1971, as psychedelia calcified into prog and the pop artists who’d sung of their minds growing up to the sky on Top of the Pops found themselves back on the cabaret circuit. There’s another volume to be written about psychedelia’s curious afterlife: the fact that a genre assumed to be a fad, inexorably linked with a moment in time and a fleeting burst of druggy utopianism, turned out to be anything but. At any point since the early 80s, you could expect to find someone doing something audibly in thrall to the soundtrack of the summer of love: from Temples to Toy, there’s certainly a lot of it about at the moment. You can see why – who wouldn’t be seduced by the sound of rock music at its most inventive? – but the big problem with a lot of latterday psychedelia is its tendency to treat Revolver or Forever Changes or The Piper at the Gates of Dawn as set texts, musical instruction manuals to be followed to the letter, which rather misses the point. One reason those albums are great is because they were made without an instruction manual: they were the work of people crashing through the usual boundaries and venturing into the unknown.

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It’s a point that Kevin Parker seems to implicitly understand. Of all the music by the current crop of psychedelically inclined artists, Tame Impala’s albums have been the least slavishly indebted to the 60s. Lonerism, in 2012, wasn’t above dropping the odd reference to the Beatles or the Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, but the songs came draped in modern electronics and slathered in distortion – not the warm, familiar fuzz of overdriven amps, but an alien, digital noise, the sound of modern machines going wrong. The result was a very 21st-century album. It served notice that Parker wasn’t interested in revivalism or sticking to a script.

Thus far, he seems to have spent 2015 moving even further off-piste. First, he co-wrote and lent his voice to three tracks on Mark Ronson’s Uptown Special album, in the process causing a degree of uproar among the let’s get a petition up about Kanye West section of Tame Impala’s fanbase. Then he announced the imminent arrival of Tame Impala’s third album by releasing Let It Happen, a song that sounded almost nothing like their last two albums. It seemed to take its cues not from Tomorrow Never Knows but the filtered house music of Daft Punk and the hazy, etiolated R&B of the Weeknd, along with the kind of early 80s album on which super-smooth pop-rock warped into something far weirder and started evoking an eerie, small-hours desolation beneath the gloss. There were no guitars on it. You would have called it a pop song, had it not swiftly abandoned all pretence of standard verse-chorus structure and spent eight minutes twisting and turning in odd directions: into extended instrumental breaks and sections of hypnotic drone, into Beach Boysesque harmonies filtered through Auto-Tune and what sounded remarkably like that reliable guarantor of daytime radio play, a bass solo. Cue further dismay from fans in the YouTube comments section.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Prickly defiance … Tame Impala. Photograph: Matt Sav

It’s possible to detect a prickly defiance in the title of another of the tracks on Currents, Yes, I’m Changing. In fact, moments on the album seem like Parker is playing against type. His biggest hit to date is Elephant, a track that stomped crowd-pleasingly along on a bover-booted glitter beat: when the same rhythm appears on The Moment, all its macho swagger is recast as a flighty, delicate skip, supporting a beautifully sugary pop tune. Parker made his name with bold, fuzzed-out guitar riffs, but virtually the only time a guitar appears on Currents, midway through the instrumental track Gossip, it sounds thin and trebly, listless and shattered, which seems in keeping with the album’s overall tone. In interviews, Parker has played down the idea of Currents as a break-up album, which is a bit rich, given that almost every song is mired in romantic despair. (The closest it gets to optimism is on the closing track, and that’s called New Person, Same Old Mistakes.)

The lyrics throughout are blunt, unadorned by metaphor: “I’m just pathetic”; “I heard they slept together, the less I know the better”; “I know that I’ll be happier and I know that you will too – eventually.” A lot of the album’s power and strangeness comes from the way they cut against the lusciousness of the arrangements – oozing synthesisers, gorgeous multitracked vocal harmonies, fluid, gently propulsive bass – and the loveliness of the melodies. On Yes, I’m Changing and The Less I Know the Better, the latter are some of the most beautiful Parker has ever written, all the more potent for his removal of the umpteen layers of echo with which he used to smear his voice.

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Like all great psychedelic music, it perfectly evokes a deeply weird altered state, albeit that of a head wrecked by grief rather than lysergic acid diethylamide. In fact, it’s strange how similar Parker makes the two seem, describing the fluctuations of misery in ways that the kaftan-clad astral travellers of 1967 would find familiar. Listening to Currents, you get the same sense of losing your bearings, of slipping in and out of reality – from the woozy music to the starkness of the lyrics – of moments of sparkling clarity interspersed with moments where you don’t know what the hell’s going on. Into the latter category goes the bizarre Past Life, on which a flat, Perth accent relates catching a glimpse of an ex in the most humdrum terms: “I was picking up a suit from the dry-cleaners, which is standard for me on a Thursday at 12.30.” But the voice is rendered creepy and robotic with electronic effects, and it is repeatedly drowned out by an exquisite vocal chorus, languidly cooing the song’s title: you can’t quite work out whether they sound sympathetic and cosseting, or slightly mocking of the narrator’s self-absorption. Behind the voices, the music shifts from 80s action-movie love theme to short-circuiting electronic noise, to hazy slow jam – and back again. It’s absurd yet enveloping. At its conclusion, you’re simultaneously baffled and intrigued. As Kevin Parker would doubtless tell you, that reaction – rather than phasing effects or guitars playing raga-like riffs through wah-wah pedals or any of the genre’s other paisley-shirted sonic cliches – is what psychedelic music is truly about.