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Blix Byrd – Elastical
#Alternative #AvantRock #avantpop #electronic #experimental #experimentalpop #Keene
CC BY-NC-SA (#CreativeCommons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike) #ccmusic
https://blixbyrd.bandcamp.com/album/elastical

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Popperimental Essentials - Operation Watermelon

"Palestine liberation movement inspired experimental pop essentials. 🇵🇸"

https://getmusic.fm/l/yNzqU6

#bandcampcodes #experimentalpop #music

Sevish – Golden Hour
#DrumBass #Electronic #London #UK #atmospheric #beats #breakbeat #chill #drumandbass #dubstep #experimentalpop #hiphop #instrumental #jungle #microtonal #xenharmonic #UnitedKingdom
CC BY-NC-ND (#CreativeCommons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives) #ccmusic
https://sevish.bandcamp.com/album/golden-hour

Schmitz & Niebuhr – The Greatest Hits
#Experimental #cassette #chamberpop #cologne #electroacoustic #electronic #electronica #experimentalpop #pop #rock #toytechno
CC BY-NC-ND (#CreativeCommons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives) #ccmusic
https://superpolar.bandcamp.com/album/the-greatest-hits

IWKC – Misha
#Alternative #dub #electro #electronica #experimental #experimentalpop #funk #fusion #hiphop #indie #instrumental #instrumentalhiphop #jazzfunk #postpunk #synthpop #synthwave #Moscow
CC BY (#CreativeCommons Attribution) #ccmusic
https://iwkc.bandcamp.com/album/misha

Tame Impala Plays “Lost in Yesterday”

Listen to this track by Australian producer, singer, and willful genre blender Kevin Parker, operating under the musical moniker Tame Impala. It’s “Lost in Yesterday”, an unabashedly sugary-pop-song-meets-space rock anthem. The song was the fourth single to appear on 2020’s The Slow Rush, his fourth album overall. By the time it came out, Parker had made his mark under the Tame Impala name, with critical praise and the respect of his peers secured, particularly since his third album Currents broke out in the international charts half a decade before.

Parker would go on to work with The Weeknd on his After Hours album. Children’s music giants The Wiggles covered his song “Elephant” complete with a quote from their own hit “Fruit Salad” to boot! Rihanna covered his “New Person, Same Old Mistakes”. There would be further collaborations still with Thundercat and even Diana Ross, among others. The divisions between genres and even eras didn’t seem to be a barrier.

With musical influence and stylistic boundaries as wide as that, Parker exercised his freedom to explore his options beyond where he started in neo-psych indie rock. This included his love of the aforementioned sugary side of pop music in the vein of Kylie Monogue and Britney Spears. He filtered that through a penchant for The Flaming Lips . The distinctions and contrasts between these musical territories aren’t really the focus of how the songs work on their own. But perhaps their effects on listeners are.

In an important respect, Tame Impala music is a culmination of a marked trend in pop music starting in 2010 when the first album came out. It incorporates the immediacy of pop music of that time and melds it with the influence of Gen Z exposure and reactions to classic rock songs thanks to Tik Tok, YouTube, and Spotify algorithms. Along those lines, this song is a synthesis of what is contemporary and what’s considered classic across generations all at the same time. Tame Impala’s sound is a singular one in this respect among pop music fans and peers alike.

Tame Impala performing at Primavera Sound festival 2019. image: Raph_PH

In terms of arrangement and sonic palette, the lines between how instruments sound individually are synthesized into a wash of sound like so many contemporary radio songs of the 2010s and into the 2020s. But the lyrics and overall presentation in “Lost in Yesterday” take cues from a decidedly more traditional songwriting approach particularly appropriate to its themes.

“Lost in Yesterday” spins a distinct narrative that has something substantial to tell listeners. It does so without throwaway lines, in-jokes, or anything that might otherwise distract from the story it’s telling. Instead, it deals directly with a fundamental theme that so many pop songs have centered around across the decades; memory.

In this, “Lost in Yesterday” casts a wide net where the audience is concerned. Everyone, young and old, has recurring memories that are often hazy and blurred when we recall them, often skewing toward the idealized and wistful when they aren’t so concerned with the regretful and painful. These memories are elusive and, at times, deceptive. The times and eras we’ve experienced are rarely as we remember them in detail. We edit them and re-position them, often according to our comfort or other motivations. This is true especially when we compare them to the challenges, worries, and troubles that beset us in our present lives.

We know we can’t change the past. That doesn’t stop us from dreaming of going back and doing it all again, and doing it right this time with more confidence and less fear. But what we often don’t account for in our wish fulfillment excursions to the past is that we were as much a part of those times as anything else we remember about them. We were not the same people we are today. We had different sets of perceptions and biases and with a great many lessons and demons still unlearned and unfaced. Yet we carry those with us in our longing to replay chapters of our lives.

Matty said life didn’t go the way that he planned it
Said “oh what I’d give to start over, Boy I’d command it”
So what was I ever afraid of? Why did I worry?
Why was I ever so brainless? Head in a flurry
~ “Lost in Yesterday” by Tame Impala

The strength of this song is how Parker avoids two particular tropes in writing a song like this about the human tendency to ponder the past. First, he isn’t cynical about it. There is no glumly delivered “nostalgia is death” sentiments delivered in judgmental and absolute terms. Second, the song doesn’t hit us over the head with similarly positioned the past is gone and it’s what you do now that counts takeaways that are so easy to say in a song, but harder to account for in times of solitude and reflection.

Instead, “Lost in Yesterday” is smart enough to consider that casting one’s mind to one’s past while wearing rose-coloured glasses and at other times with regret are as much a part of one’s everyday life in the present as anything. In this, our past is very much still in our present. These things are of a whole. We re-write the past all the time, or at least crop images of it like psychic photographs to keep the essences and favourite episodes of our lives intact as little treasures to savour. And if we need to face up to certain things, why should that be so complicated? Why not exercise our well-earned confidence and courage in our lives right now in the same way that we fantasize about taking them with us as we transport ourselves to a past era to do it all again?

It’s this life-affirming quality applied to the subject matter that helps to make “Lost in Yesterday” such a singular pop song with something to say to an audience. It embraces the universal notion of how each of us accounts for our pasts and does so in a respectful and even empowering way. After all, our past is ours to curate as we wish, as long as we continue to recognize that we will never have the complete picture and that there may be times when we must confront the sometimes difficult truth that our version of the past is not the same as anyone else’s. The same will be true later on as this present we’re now in becomes the subject of our selective mind’s eye years down the road. Until then, every moment continues to be precious.

Tame Impala is an active musical entity today, with Kevin Parker making the records in the studio, and with musicians joining him under that moniker onstage. You can learn more at tameimpala.com

For more background around the (rather troubled!) time that The Slow Rush album came out, check out this interview with Kevin Parker of Tame Impala on Vulture.

Enjoy!

#2020sMusic #experimentalPop #neoPsychedelia #SongsAboutMemory #TameImpala