I just spent five or six minutes scanning through my whole iTunes list trying to figure out who these guys sound exactly like. It was on the tip of my brain's tongue...something kind of fuzzy, legitimately psychedelic, from an age only a few decades previous yet so much a part of ancient history...but I wasn't finding it.

Then I remembered a mixtape a friend of mine gave me at the start of the summer with the words "Party World" scrawled on it in barely visible ballpoint pen. It was a world music compilation, or sorts, except instead of pseudo-ethnic Putamayan Starbucks background noise, the mix was a era-spanning, four-corners-of-the-word searching examination of the international rock and roll community's contribution to the classic era of psych-rock. Bands like Dickens (French), Synkopy (Czech), Selda Bagcan (Turkish), and Zafer Dilek (???) are spread out across the disc's hour and a half runtime, and despite (because of?) near-disintegration levels of production on so many tracks, the thing is a messy, swirling, joyously disorienting shred-a-thon. 

So pulled out the mix and put it on. And I realized that it's not exactly who I thought Tame Impala sound like, but exactly where I immediately felt like I might have heard them before; set somewhere in the middle of "Party World", slid comfortably, perhaps, between, The Index's "Shock Wave" and Bonnie St Claire's "Tame Me, Tiger". Or maybe just before The Tea Company's soaring rendition of "You Keep Me Hangin' On". Or, whatever.

I guess what I'm getting at here is, in a year when 60s/70s psych-rock is suddenly positing itself front and centre as the reference point of choice for the most successful indie-cum-mainstream bands, Tame Impala's 5-song EP arrives just in time to remind everyone that psych was never about dancing or soundtracking makeout scenes on Gossip Girl, but completely and totally about getting stoned with your bros, piling on the atmospherics, and reaching for heaven. Is Anteras, Mira, Sun 'retro' in this respect? Some would argue 'yes'. Do I and should you give a fuck? No. It's awesome.