To me, each of Kevin Parker’s albums had gotten better and better, to the point where 2015’s Currents was one of my three favorite albums of the decade. I loved the singles off The Slow Rush that had been released, particularly the skittering beat and seductive bassline of “Lost in Yesterday.” Some of this is the way The Slow Rush holds together. Something about the stickiness of it, the memory of one track bleeding into another, isn’t as apparent as on his previous work. This makes it easier to skip around, and this makes those singles feel more like singles. It is immaculate music, loaded with little side roads and detours, and I will listen to it probably hundreds of times, but there’s that little something missing, that dagger to my chest, that shiver up my spine that I thought would hit me long before now. It’s what separates very good albums from masterpieces, and it’s something that becomes clearer and clearer over time. Time I’ve now had with The Slow Rush, which I like an awful lot, but has failed to make me fall in love.
