Tame Impala

Tame Impala is the project of mastermind musician Kevin Parker, who writes, produces, and plays all the instruments in the studio while a more or less fixed group of musicians works with him in live performances. Parker has produced a series of highly successful and much emulated albums in this manner. His anchor seems to be planted firmly in the psychedelia of the late '60s (see Syd Barrett and the early years of the Canterbury bands like Soft Machine and Caravan). His music has been tilting more towards pop and soul elements in more recent albums, but the pull of the psychedelic sound remains strong in the Impala catalog. Parker is very good at creating extra sweet melodies that also manage to stay an inch shy of becoming relentless earworms. He is also very good at cranking out musical phrases put together so perfectly that one can't help feeling that they must have heard them somewhere before, although they haven't.