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Sep 23, 2015 Issue #53 - April/May 2015 - Tame Impala By John Everhart

Los Angeles via Australia act The Black Ryder emerged in 2010 from the ashes of The Morning After Girls. Smoldering tracks rife with thickets of reverb and a crepuscular, psychedelic vibe colored their debut, Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride, released on Mexican Summer. Singer/multi-instrumentalist Aimee Nash and guitarist/all-around jack of all-trades Scott Von Ryper crafted an album with a stark, cinematic feel, carnivalesque and entropic with an overriding theme of the Hunter S. Thompson inspired fuck-all, go-for-broke nature of the title. On its follow-up, The Door Behind the Door, the pair have created an even more eclectic piece, ranging from the suffocating, cloistered dread of opener “Babylon” to the chiming, Spector-esque surge of “Santaria.” On The Door Behind the Door, the band manage to take “the ride” through protean, rollercoaster twists and turns without treading water, an admirable feat.

“We had quite a lot of material that didn’t make it onto this record, but it made perfect sense for us to start the album with ‘Babylon’ because there’s something quite dark, chaotic, and almost unsettling to it, but we love it,” says Nash of the album’s mission statement and subsequent journey. “You’re not sure where you’re headed, just like life and our time on this planet, you can never be sure where you’re going to end up. And that’s part of the experience…. If you can stay the course it may take you somewhere beautiful.”

The gestation of the album wasn’t an easy one for the band. It was colored by personal strife, both physical and psychological.

“I spent some time in hospital, so there was some illness and recovery time,” says Nash. “I also had tendinitis in my right arm and was advised to try and not use it for around six months, which as you could imagine made it quite difficult to be as productive as I would have liked to be. All of those experiences no doubt contributed to the end result. When I wrote the lyrics for ‘Let Me Be Your Light’ I was going through a time of dealing with personal loss, feeling very disconnected and dark. I was trying to be the voice I wanted to hear myself.”

What’s perhaps most remarkable about the album is the deft intuitiveness which Nash and Von Ryper have attained through a long-term relationship that once saw them married, yet allowed them to pick up the pieces and continue making music after they divorced, suggesting that a creative partnership can sometimes trump a romantic one.

“We can experience all sorts of emotions and events that leave an imprint, things can accumulate, if you’ve experienced any kind of trauma there is that emotional muscle memory, the more that builds up the more you have to overcome,” she says. “Sometimes it can feel impossible to overcome such things, but the more we challenge ourselves to keep moving through it all with some hope, the better chance we have to survive.”

[Note: This article first appeared in Under the Radar’s April/May/June 2015 print issue. This is its debut online.]

www.theantimachinemachine.com

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