Some prominent examples include J Dilla’s Donuts, which samples 10cc on back-to-back tracks to kick off the album ( “The Worst Band in the World” on “Workinonit” and “Johnny, Don’t Do It” on “Waves”), and of the 28 tracks that have flipped “I’m Not in Love,” Roc Marciano’s “76” and Freddie Gibbs and Madlib’s “S–tsville” rank among the most notable.Įlsewhere on The Slow Rush, you can hear traces of the contrasting hard-edged guitars and smooth groove of 10cc’s “Wall Street Shuffle,” the woozy “I’m Mandy Fly Me,” the Wurlitzer organ on “For You and I,” and the funky, conga-driven wistfulness of “Marriage Bureau Rendezvous.” By sampling encyclopedia ’s count, 64 10cc songs have been mined for samples, most of them by hip hop artists. Perhaps the first and most famous usage of this technique is on the biggest hit of 10cc’s career, 1975’s swooning, otherworldly ballad “I’m Not in Love.” Parker blends this with a dance music thump, to the point that it starts to resemble 2003 house banger “In Love With You” by French duo The Paradise.Īdditional cross-pollination occurs throughout the album when Parker outfits retro sounds with the tempo and harder-hitting drums of hip hop - seriously, “Breathe Deeper” sounds like a long-lost Bad Boy flip of silky ‘70s soul - and 10cc weren’t strangers to either of those. Slow Rush opener “One More Year” kicks off with a rich synth pad Parker made by sampling his own voice. With four primary songwriters, the band often seemed to be pulling itself in multiple directions at once (whereas Parker manages that feat all on his own), but the pop chops of each and every member kept a level head on the band’s sound during their 1973-78 peak. The comparison goes beyond similarities in sound - 10cc were every bit as arty and deep as Kevin Parker is. Of all the artists on this list, 10cc are the closest analogue to Tame Impala in 2020. Here are 10 soft rock-adjacent artists, ranging from proggy experimentalists to power ballad schmoozers to washed-up classic rockers to Motown legends, whose work most noticeably informs The Slow Rush, with a playlist of their relevant material included at the end. And contrary to the schmaltzy pap that defines a good deal of soft rock songwriting, The Slow Rush is, lyrically speaking, Tame Impala’s deepest and most meditative album yet. The Slow Rush is even less so: While it revitalizes uncool tones from the ‘70s and ‘80s heyday of soft rock and AOR in a way that’s not dissimilar to what indie heroes Destroyer did with sophisti-pop on 2010’s Kaputt, reimagining them from the vantage point of modern dance music and hip-hop. Innerspeaker, with its funky drumming, krautrock-inspired song structures, and washed out synths, was never as paint-by-numbers as some critics said it was. Parker’s music, despite its reverence for the past, is never purely carbon copy pastiche. Of course, there’s a reason why Tame Impala has always stood out in a crowd of contemporary shaggy-haired, tiny-sunglassed psych revivalists, and that hasn’t changed on The Slow Rush. Historically, this is the most natural path for a psychedelic rock band to follow: Less radical stagnation, more de-fanged maturation. Fleetwood Mac went from recording “psychedelic blues odysseys” to glossy blockbusters. Crosby, Stills and Nash went from “Almost Cut My Hair” to cleaned-up sailing enthusiasts. In 1969, The Grateful Dead released Live/Dead, the quintessential document of San Francisco’s hair-raising psych concerts in 1979, they were in between the disco-influenced Shakedown Street and the breezy Go to Heaven. In 1969, Jefferson Airplane were the acid-drenched, profane band behind the searing protest album Volunteers by 1979, they were the marketable, platinum-selling Jefferson Starship.
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