The last pre-release single, “Eventually”, landed somewhere between “‘Cause I’m a Man”’s pop gold and Lonerism’s hard-hitting psychedelia, suggesting that those fans hoping for a purer, rock-redeemed Currents tracklist were likely out of luck.īut Currents proper still retains the band’s sense for aesthetics, even through their unique musical evolution. Parker’s studio tricks were naturally lost on the skeptics, but the “Disciples” gimmick was a confirmation of the same retro-to-contemporary shift used to great effect on “Let It Happen”. The minute-and-a-half “Disciples” dropped a few weeks later, its instrumentation clouded by lo-fi, heavily filtered production that approximates the mono sound of early garage rock, all before someone hits a switch and the music expands and modernizes in an instant with blustering compressed drums, creamy guitars and groaning bass. “‘Cause I’m a Man”, released in early April, exacerbated fears with twinkling bells, synthetic drum sounds, and an infectious vocal melody that come dangerously close to the sounds of 1980s pop ballads. Later singles did nothing to assuage those concerns. It’s perhaps Tame Impala’s most interesting composition to date, yet many early fans who identified with the vintage whimsy of Innerspeaker and the robust guitar rock of Lonerism remained wholly unconvinced. “Let It Happen” ends with all these independent layers wonderfully and improbably united: dirty fuzz guitar, vocoder, and gaudy synth don’t battle for space but harmonize with one another as a lush, satisfying whole. Provocatively, Tame Impala mastermind Kevin Parker even employs sample looping effects in the track’s lush instrumental section, trapping digital and analog sounds together in a disruptive, hiccupping loop for over a minute. To be fair, the nearly eight-minute “Let It Happen” may have been a lot to swallow for traditional rock purists: swirling keyboards and a vocoder line steal melodic focus from the effects-draining guitars, the drums throb with the static pulse of electronic dance music, and the instrumentation all but dies away behind an EQ filter during the song’s ethereal refrain. For the followers of a band that styled themselves after the Beatles and retro garage rock artists, the song represented shameless aspirations toward mass appeal pop with - the biggest sin of all for those who value the elusive “human touch” of rock - heavy electronic influence. Early responses to the record’s early danceable single “Let It Happen” were mixed, but a very vocal minority expressed their distaste for the band’s move away from tasteful psych-rock toward a more intrepid electro-funk bent. If nothing else, Tame Impala’s third album Currents has revealed the continued existence of residual resentment toward disco among rock fans.