Album reviews: Tame Impala, Guided by Voices, Huey Lewis and the News

Tame Impala

The Slow Rush

(Interscope/Fiction *** 1/2)

The Slow Rush is preoccupied with the passage of time, so it’s appropriate that the fourth album by Australian pop auteur Kevin Parker has arrived a year late. For Parker’s one-man band, 2019 was supposed to be a triumphal year — and indeed it was, with headline dates at Coachella and a memorable tour stop last summer at the Mann Center in Fairmount Park.

Parker missed the deadline, however, for his follow-up to Tame Impala’s 2015 psychedelic pop breakthrough, Currents. Instead, he released only a handful of songs last year, including one cheekily titled “Patience.”

That song didn’t make the Slow Rush final cut, but a dozen other tracks did, including the sleek pop-soul nugget “Borderline,” altered from its original 2019 form. (Parker is a tinkerer who is not finished until he’s finished; he’s credited as producer and songwriter, and plays all the music himself.)

On 2010’s Innerspeaker and 2012’s Lonerism, Parker came on like an acid-tested ‘60s throwback, seeking stoner bliss. He’s since evolved as a master pop craftsman. The Slow Rush at first seems like a lighter-than-air mood piece, fluttering from the sky like the candy-colored confetti at an artfully directed Tame Impala show.

Repeated listening, however, reveals angst lurking beneath the Day-Glo rock, disco, and house music surface. “Posthumous Forgiveness” considers things left unsaid in his relationship with his late father. And on “It Might Be Time,” the 34-year-old confronts a reality all aging rock stars one day face. ”You ain’t as cool as you used to be," he sings. "You ain’t as young as you used to be.” — Dan DeLuca

Guided by Voices

Surrender Your Poppy Field

(GBV Inc. ***)

First, the numbers: Surrender Your Poppy Field is, by some counts, the 30th Guided by Voices album, the seventh since the current lineup featuring guitarists Doug Gillard and Bobby Bare Jr. solidified in 2017, and the first of 2020, with at least one more in the works. With solo albums and other releases, leader Bob Pollard, 62, has put out over 100 albums, working seemingly endless variations on British invasion/power pop/garage rock/psychedelic guitar rock for three decades.

Surrender Your Poppy Field ranges widely over its 15 songs, often tilting to heavy, trudging songs that are more Sabbath than Who. But it’s got a handful of chiming anthems (“Physician”), several multipart brief suites (“Year of the Hard Hitter”), and splashes of strings and keyboards (“Whoah Nelly”). Pollard’s lyrics lean more on non sequiturs than coherence, but there may be some political frustration in accusatory songs such as “Stone Cold Moron” and “Man Called Blunder.” Poppy Field isn’t the best recent GBV album — I’d vote for last year’s Zeppelin Over China or 2018’s Space Gun — but it’s a worthy addition to Pollard’s vast canon. — Steve Klinge

Huey Lewis and the News

Weather

(BMG ***)

Back in the ‘80s, Huey Lewis declared, “It’s hip to be square.” He certainly gave it his best shot. His middle-of-the-road approach turned the News into a commercial juggernaut. If not exactly cutting edge, there was no denying the unpretentious affability of the music and the singer.

Now 69 and battling a disease that affects his hearing, Lewis is back with his first album of new material in nearly 20 years, albeit a brief one: Weather is just seven tracks (including a terrific cover of the oldie “Pretty Girls Everywhere”). The opener, “When We’re Young,” is a mid-tempo ballad that acknowledges the passing of the years and carries a poignant sense of mortality. But not much has changed musically: The News still delivers pop laced with horn-accented rock and R&B. Sometimes, as on “Her Love Is Killin’ Me” (with slashing harmonica by Lewis) and “Hurry Back Baby,” it has a bracing bite.

To close, Lewis and the News take a left turn into pure honky-tonk with “One of the Boys.” Lewis sings about his luck in still living his dream, being “with them boys up on the stand … making beautiful noise.” — Nick Cristiano