Last month, Tame Impala scored their (his?) first-ever top-10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, a truly stunning success. Last year’s track “Dracula” was already Kevin Parker’s first Hot 100 hit, and now the remix with Jennie from BlackPink is a full-on global summer jam that sits at #18 this week. Critics might not be into the style of vaguely psychedelic dance-rock that Tame Impala employed on last year’s Deadbeat, but the general public is into it. Thankfully, however, Parker has not entirely forgotten his past as a starry-eyed psychedelic rocker, and you can hear that in his new Smashing Pumpkins cover.
You know what’s crazy? The “Dracula” remix is technically a bigger Billboard chart success than anything that the Smashing Pumpkins ever did. The Pumpkins made it to #12 with “1979,” but they have zero top-10 hits to their name. Of course, that doesn’t really matter. Smashing Pumpkins have left their mark on music forever, and you can count the upcoming compilation Sending Hearts To All My Dearies – A Tribute To The Smashing Pumpkins as evidence of that.
Billy Corgan gave Sending Hearts To All My Dearies his blessing and its title, and it features Smashing Pumpkins covers from the likes of Alice Glass, Meg Myers, the Midnight, Palaye Royale, and Nita Strauss. Some of the big songs — “Tonight, Tonight,” “Cherub Rock,” “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” “1979” — get two covers apiece. But the coup is obviously the inclusion of Tame Impala’s version of “Hummer,” the timelessly gorgeous track from the 1993 masterpiece Siamese Dream, and that’s also the lead single.
In a press release, Parker says, “Siamese Dream was the soundtrack to my high school years, and ‘Hummer’ is the song that takes me back there in the most potent way.” As it happens, Parker and Corgan interviewed each other in 2020. Tame Impala’s six-minute take on “Hummer” is loose and dreamy. It’s got some of the electronic textures of Parker’s recent work, but it also dials into the guitar overdrive that he still knows so well. “Hummer” sounds completely natural as a Tame Impala song. Furthermore, it sounds like a really good Tame Impala song. Below, check out Tame Impala’s version of “Hummer,” as well as the Pumpkins original and the tracklist for Sending Hearts To All My Dearies.
TRACKLIST:
01 Tame Impala – “Hummer”
02 Yonaka – “Today”
03 The Midnight – “Tonight, Tonight”
04 Carpenter Brut – “Cherub Rock”
05 Barns Courtney – “1979”
06 Meg Myers – “Eye”
07 Palaye Royale – “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”
08 Between The Buried And Me – “Jellybelly”
09 Alice Glass – “Drown”
10 Starbenders – “Tonight, Tonight”
11 Nita Strauss – “1979”
12 Bones UK – “Cherub Rock”
13 Moon Taxi – “Thirty Three”
14 Des Rocs – “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”
15 Urban Heat – “Ava Adore”
Sending Hearts To All My Dearies – A Tribute To The Smashing Pumpkins is out 8/14, with a deluxe vinyl edition coming 10/16, on Sumerian. Pre-order it here.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
