Currents is a stunning, near-perfect sonic achievement, made all the more powerful by the clash between its precise instrumentals and hazy lyrics. The LP announces Tame Impala as the rare group whose work isn't linked by rehashes of the same familiar sounds, but consistent mood, themes, and ethos present at the core of everything they record. The band's third offering has been hailed as a departure from their previous work. More accurately, it's an amplification of every shift Kevin Parker and co. made between their debut Innerspeaker and follow-up release Lonerism. After the magnetism of pop music shook up the group's lo-fi sound, Currents pushes the needle even further from psychedelia and towards an R&B/disco sound that only threatened to claw to the surface on Lonerism. Instead of hesitantly stripping back a few more guitars, Parker all but phased them out for the synths that form the backbone of this LP. Rather than resist his his growing auteur-like tendencies, the group's frontman/writer/producer Parker cut out all collaborations and added another responsibility to his ever-growing list: mixing. Yet the remarkable thing about Currents isn't how indistinguishable the record is from the band's previous releases; it's how perfectly it blends into the rest of their discography. Despite marked sonic and lyrical changes, it only takes a few notes from the massive intro track “Let It Happen” to realize this could only be a Tame Impala album. Whether this trilogy's narrator slides into the past or embraces the healing properties of the future, puts on a false bravado or gets crippled by anxiety, we are never left feeling that the inconsistencies are the result of Parker conjuring up new narrators to deliver one-off tracks. Rather, we're reminded a person is more than their current mindstate, just as a band isn't defined by the amount of fuzzy guitars it's employing in any given moment.
