Upstart music journalism, like the brand we provide here at Inyourspeakers, is a lot like playing in a semi-promising local band. Your audience is comprised mostly of your friends, and only a handful of those people are paying even slight attention. Sometimes, we have to wonder if even our venerable editors are reading these articles which, being online, cannot even be properly classified as “shit tickets” unless you have a printer and a long-suffering rectum.

But, for those of you out there who have been reading this article series consistently, you will notice that oftentimes, brand new albums from brand new artists are not welcome. Sharon Jones and Midlake have both released such very strong records with powerful lead-in tracks, that we can honestly place them in league with the time-tested Track One Side Ones, despite how recently “Acts of Man” or “The Game Gets Old” were recorded. However, Sharon Jones and Midlake are both established acts, and we can therefore critique their newer work within both the context of their genre, and the context of their prior efforts. We cannot say that recent work by those bands will be regarded forever as the apex of their catalog, but we can say that it is among the best work they have done so far.

However, a brand new album from a brand new band, while exciting and good on some level, should seldom be labeled as “classic” on the same Tuesday that it is released. A new song/album/band is like a liver transplant - we can be cautiously optimistic about it immediately, but let's wait a while, see if that strange new meat gets assimilated into your body before we start slapping high-fives and canceling funeral plans. Reflect back honestly on 1994. If you were born between 1980 and 1983, Korn's debut album seemed like the most soothing balm in a post-Cobain musical landscape, and you were totally ignorant of Silver Jews' existence. Don't front. How do you feel about “Shoots and Ladders” now, over a decade later?

Yet, for all the wariness mitigating our optimism over a new band's first LP, one cannot help but throw all that caution out the window upon listening to “It Is Not Meant To Be”, the colorful, hallucinatory opener on Tame Impala's Innerspeaker. That this psych-rock quartet from Perth, Australia have made a strong debut is not necessarily big news. The fact that they made an album, simultaneously textbook in its sound, and somehow revitalizing to the Nouveau-Psychedelia movement right from that first song, is an achievement which cannot be overstated.

“It Is Not Meant To Be” begins with a brief moment of static, followed by a guitar arpeggio whose delay and reverb give the impression that the listener has begun to float in the air. Suddenly, steadily moving, cymbal-heavy drums enter the track and the mood has changed from languid hovering to zooming ascent into the clouds. The cacophony of drums, bass, guitar and organ cease for a brief moment as vocalist Kevin Parker begins calling out from what sounds like the bowels of a deep cave. The subsequent verses are kept together by the organ, acting as spinal column, while the remaining instrumentation evolves and grows, stretching off to unexplored corners. The track has all the fluidity of an improv session, without delving into redundancy or inanity. The drum work is especially delightful, as it embraces a sort of Gene-Krupka-on-shrooms feel. Despite a bit of lyrical vapidity, Parker's vocals, which channel Lennon, soar through the track like a leaden call to prayer. Ultimately dominating and defining a song which wants to spread thickly and chaotically, the singing provides enough slack for the other instruments to play freely, but also enough control to keep them from descending into total unorganized madness.

While the song is definitely good from a musical perspective, it becomes great when viewed as an example of musical semiotics. If I were an ad agent, I would probably say that “It Is Not Meant To Be” by Tame Impala has all that great LSD feeling, sans the risk of trying to fly off your eighth-story balcony. And I'd be right. In the musical world, we've come to accept certain sounds as belonging to certain genres, and which genres have some sort of ubiquitous agenda or philosophy. We mostly do this on a visual level. When you see people in the garb of their musical genre, you tend to be able to guess, at the very least, their basic overriding opinions. The kid with the liberty spikes and the dog collar probably likes The Exploited, and probably thinks he's an anarchist. The guy with the red flannel shirt and the epic beard probably likes to smoke weed, talks vaguely about The Communist Manifesto's applications to file-sharing, and listens to a lot of Dr. Dog and Neutral Milk Hotel.

So, if we can do all that, simply by spying on the supposed fans of these bands and genres, shouldn't we be able to find the same kind of signs within the music itself? For example, tremolo-picked power chords on treble-heavy distortion tends to mean black metal, which implies Germanic Neo-Paganism on one end, or the Leveyen Satanist proscription that man should become his own God figure. A steady 4/4 drum beat, relying heavily on the exchange between the bass drum and snare, with little attention to the cymbals or toms, makes people think hip hop, which traditionally communicates a romantic outlaw, rags-to-riches narrative. Dirty guitar, blues scale, fast beats and half-wailed vocals equal garage rock, which music seems centered around a sentiment half-nihilistic, half-bacchanalian. By now, the diverse annals of pop music have become so formulaic that their elements have become instantly recognizable. This is not necessarily a negative observation. It simply means that Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes were correct in positing that very few things in our culture do not act as some sort of a sign or signifier communicating a greater truth about our socio-cultural outlook.

Tame Impala succeeds ultimately by embracing this principle of musical semiotics. Either consciously or unconsciously, they have assembled what are considered to be the general elements of psychedelia; the jazz-influenced drumming, the vintage organ sound, the heavy delay/light distortion adding color to a guitar that tends to wander all over the scale rather than stay confined to any particular repetition of chords. Reverb on the vocals completes the formula. When put together within the context of solid composition and playing ability, the philosophies of the psychedelic movement, the emphasis on exploration and tapping into the uncharted territories of the mind/soul complex are so apparent, that they need not even be communicated through bad lyricism about “freeing one's mind.” The very sounds themselves signify to the listener that they should relinquish the hold they have on their own psyche and wander for a spell. Tame Impala, in this way, are at the current epitome of their genre.

If this is how Tame Impala begins their career, then it will certainly be exciting to see what the band has in store for their audience in the future. We can only hope that this is not a case of a strong debut to a lackluster catalog, because Innerspeaker is so good that such a case would be a disappointment on par with Weezer's post-Pinkerton descent into utter vapidity. It is hoped that Tame Impala, no mere journeymen in the game of psychedelia, will take the confidence--which can only come from knocking it out of the park on the first swing--and use it as fuel to explore and to expand their sound beyond what they have already done. Should they disappoint us, we can at least take solace in the fact that from “It Is Not Meant To Be” to “Runway, Houses, City, Clouds,” Innerspeaker is a fine album which only gets better from its phenomenal Track One.