Has it become long enough for emo to become cool again? We really fucked it up the last time we did it, but the heyday of that movement was almost a decade or so ago at this point, so maybe we’ve finally been given enough breathing space to turn around and re-evaluate it. I mean…not everything about it sucked, right? Disregarding the squeaky clean, theatrical rubbish that it devolved to, ’emo’ originally started out as something fairly simple: a bunch of dudes who were lost in the world, and looking for a way to express their anguish concerning this. In spite of the Live Journal worship that emo became, the forefathers of the movement were actually concerned with issues deeper than whether or not their girlfriends liked their new shade of eyeliner. Sure, love was a huge topic as it always is, but so was life itself, and all of those horrifying existential side effects of being conscious in the 21st century. The genre got the name it did because it was music vesseled by emotion, and that was originally the only real criteria for its categorization. It really is a shame that it was corrupted into the whiny bullshit that it became.

Earlier this year, Cloud Nothings turned everyone’s heads by emerging from the fuzzy haze of bedroom pop with Attack On Memory, a blazing  post-hardcore album with muscles that they weren’t afraid to use. Well…kinda. The mind behind Cloud Nothings, Dylan Baldi, retained a lot of his melodic sensibilities from previous Cloud Nothings releases, they’re just shrouded in so much aggressive, noisy guitar and balls-to-the-wall percussion that its easy to forget that you’re essentially listening to a pop song. Baldi essentially reappropriated early emo stylings to expand upon his own brand of bedroom pop music. And it worked; even eight months later, Attack on Memory is still a fresh kick to the face to knock you out of your narcosis.

Lonerism sounds nothing like Attack on Memory, yet there are vital similarities between the two releases. Both Tame Impala and Cloud Nothings are largely singular visions. Both are also products of frustration and disillusionment, Baldi feeling this over the modern indie-pop scene and Parker of Tame Impala feeling it over his own social isolation. It’s very emotional music on both fronts, just with two different modes of presentation of this emotion. Where Baldi appropriated the noise and aggression of early emo to expand upon his pop music, Parker kinda works in the opposite way, borrowing the juxtaposition of happy-go-lucky melody and dark lyricism from later period emo (don’t worry, the good stuff) to beef up his trippy psych rock. Both Parker and Baldi grew up in the same  generation, one of them just happened to get more into 70s prog than 90s grunge. You can tell, however, that both of them were influenced by the same appealing aspect of emo music, that being a productive and creative way to settle some very troubling issues.

I wasn’t really expecting much from this album. Tame Impala’s debut, Innerspeaker, was decent enough, but didn’t break enough ground to catch my attention. So when I first listened to this album, I didn’t expect to be sucked into it to the extent that I was. Parker’s embracing of melody and tunefulness compliments the music to the extent that every song stands out as its own unique entity, even if it is all derived from the same sound. Groups like MGMT have been trying to reintegrate psychedelic rock into pop music for years, with generally unsuccessful results. Tame Impala succeeds where these other bands don’t due to the breadth of emotion in the music. I mean… this record’s called Lonerism, for fuck’s sake. That should be a good enough indication that maybe Parker isn’t too afraid of wearing his heart on his sleeve. According to the lead man, he wrote this album about the struggle of being out on tour and being forced into all these different social situations, and realizing in these situations that you just don’t really connect with anyone else. If it seems silly to you that a dude in a band would be complaining about being anti-social, consider that Parker recorded and produced almost every single track on both Innerspeaker and Lonerism by himself. This dude is…well, a loner. While the affect in his voice is usually hidden beneath reverb and other various effects, there are moments on the album where the emotion in his voice is so thick its almost syrupy. Take album highlight “Why Won’t They Talk To Me?” where Parker sings the titular chorus with such feeling that when he declares ‘but I don’t really care about it anyway’ in the song’s bridge, its honestly pretty hard to believe him. Actually, take away the kaleidoscopic filters and “Why Won’t They Talk To Me?” sounds like it could be almost be a more upbeat Grandaddy song. Its a pretty depressing sing-a-long, but you can’t help it because its just so god damn catchy. The same could be said for the rest of the album, each track containing gem after gem of choruses that get stuck in your head for days.

What keeps these songs in your head is Parker’s firm grounding in psychedelia, whereas most pop just gets discarded quickly due to lack of substance. While you may initially listen to these songs for the pure dopamine rush of the verses and choruses, its the proggy freak outs and fried production that will keep you listening to them long after that rush has worn off. While the straightforward first few minutes of “Keep On Lying,” are great in and of itself, its in the song’s instrumental back half is where things really take off. Layer after layer of keyboard and guitar stack up until the blissful moment when it all comes together and the keys are brought up so high in the mix they sound like heaven. Even the obvious single off the album, “Elephant,” can’t help but to devolve into a total stoner jam about halfway through. Parker has said that he originally wanted to make a very standard fare pop album, but scrapped those ideas in favour of this more psychedelic approach. I’m glad he did, because the amalgamation he has created in Lonerism is very original and very engrossing. With this album, Kevin Parker and Tama Impala join the growing legion of bands trying to prove that whiny grown men making music haven’t gone away, they’ve just gotten better at doing it.

-Phil Maye