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Album Details

• Artist: Tame Impala
• Album: Innerspeaker
• Label: Modular Records
• Year of Release: 2010
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: charlesmartel on 2011-12-09

"Move along folks, move along. Nothing to see here." So chanted the policeman, rhythmically, as the crowd gathered around the place where the man had levitated off the pavement and, crying out aloud denunciations of Kentucky Fried Chicken as the food of the Devil, had flown off into the distant peaks beyond the edge of the city. All that was left behind was a small stain on the pavement, which a couple of masked, white suited SOCO's were trying to take samples.

It had been an otherwise ordinary day. The coffee had gone slightly stale and lost its fragrance for being too long exposed to air as coffee grounds (I really must buy fresh beans in future) and the journey to work had been as dull and boring as ever. Sure, I sat and read "Ulysses" by Joyce, but I was not actually reading it in the sense of taking it in and understanding what was being said. It was more a case of me just looking at the words on the page, small twisted shapes which I knew conveyed sounds and which I knew the sounds conveyed meaning, but really, I was not absorbing anything.

And that was the presage to a normal day. My desk was as neat and tidy as ever - I always made sure to tidy it up before I left the previous day - but today ended differently. Today I got the sack. My employers were not happy. "You don't seem to be enjoying your work" they said. "We don't want people who don't enjoy their work as they obviously don't want to be here. And if you don't want to be here, don't be. You're fired. You have fifteen minutes to leave." And that was it. Fifteen years of my life devoted to those ungrateful bastards and that is how I am repaid.

But as I left that drab office building in west London and made my way to the tube station. I felt an amazing sense of liberation. I did not have to get up to go to work tomorrow. I could stay in bed. Shit I could even get up after my wife for a change - now that would be a novel experience. I didn't have to put on a suit. I didn't have to shave. I could actually sit down and read "Ulysses" instead of just looking at the words. I could try to understand it. But above all, I could listen to music all day, whenever I wanted to, without being stared at like some skiver with an iPod headphone in his ears; without being regarded as a freak.

And I had so much to listen to and so much to relisten to. I wanted to go back and revisit all those pieces of music I had set aside for the day when I would have the time to appreciate them fully. Like books, music had become a mere soundtrack, like the backing to some awful commercial selling soap powder or chocolate fingers which the pretty girl in the field seductively bit into like a woman devouring a penis in a Pasolini film. (Oh, I could watch films as well).

And so by the time I got home I was ecstatic. I went straight to the CD and put on a new CD I had recently bought. Nothing too original there, but it was different. I had heard it before, well maybe not, but it sounded like I had. It was kind of updated but had a very sixties feel to it. It reminded me of my youth. It reminded me that no matter how things change, they never really change on a fundamental level. The circle just turns around until what was once at the top, then at the bottom, will once again rise to the top. When I had first listened to it I hadn't liked it. A second listen enabled me to hear different things within it and, though I was still seriously unsure, I decided to go out and buy it thinking that it would grow on me.

Well, it had. And by the time I got to my sixth or seventh listen I was convinced that there had always been more to it than I had at first suspected. In particular, the last track offered more than I had initially dreamed of from this album. It was then that I decided to give it another listen as I walked out of the house, down the street and headed to the pub for a quick, celebratory pint. I was listening to it all the way as I walked there, and as I sat in the pub downing my three pints of cold amber liquid with a slightly frothy head and the slightest hint of something living in the uncleaned pipes which led from the barrel in the cellar to the pump on the bar.

After the album had finished I left the bar and started to walk down the street back home. But something convinced me to stop. I stopped. I sat down on the pavement, crossed legged and shut my mind to the outside world. And that was the last thing I remember before I woke up, cold and shivering in a gorge just outside the city.

I really must remember to take my medicine in future.

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