Tame Impala: Lonerism (2LP, UK import) [FICTION]

Why you'll love it

Fiction's 2LP pressing spreads Lonerism over four sides in a gatefold jacket. It won Album of the Year at the 2013 ARIA Awards, picked up a Grammy nomination, and gave us "Elephant" and "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards."

This edition

• 2LP set, four sides
• Gatefold jacket
• Fiction pressing (cat# 3795300), imported

About the album

Kevin Parker started writing Lonerism almost as soon as Innerspeaker was out, telling himself the songs were for "some other weird project" so the pressure wouldn't get to him. He then recorded it more or less everywhere: a guitar take in Vienna, a vocal on a plane from Singapore to London, most of the rest at home in Perth and in Paris. He wrote, played and produced nearly all of it himself, with Jay Watson helping on two tracks, and he swapped a lot of the guitars for synths and samples, chasing catchier melodies because he loved pop and saw no reason to hide it.

The result is a psychedelic record about feeling alone in a crowd. Parker filled it with dictaphone recordings of street noise and chatter, and the cover is a photo of the Jardin du Luxembourg seen through a locked fence. "Elephant" stomps like glam rock, "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards" is pure sugar, and "Apocalypse Dreams" builds to a blowout that still makes people turn the volume up.

It went to No. 4 in Australia and No. 14 in the UK, and has sold more than 210,000 copies in the US. A fair number of those went to Toronto, judging by how often we reorder it.

Tracklist

Listen

On Fiction (cat# 3795300), a reissue of the 2012 album.