.jpeg)
Deadbeat is the title Kevin Parker has chosen for his fifth album under the Tame Impala moniker. But after a day of listening to the way the 39-year-old Aussie unpacks his social and emotional struggles into catchy piano hooks and rubberised dance beats (both inspired by and quoting those on Michael Jackson’s Thriller), I’ve come to think of the trippily bop-able record as: Imposter Syndrome Does Disco.
In an in-depth interview for GQ this year, Parker was frank about the difficult childhood that saw him shunted between homes as his parents split, reconciled, then split again, resulting in him and his brother living in an outhouse for an extended period in their teens. The kid who once spent meticulous hours crafting complex Lego worlds grew into an adolescent equally obsessed with building otherworldly soundscapes. Nobody, he suspected, would want to be in a band with him. Over the past 20 years, his ascent from prog-rock loner to mainstream pop producer par excellence (turning out bouncy-sharp dance hooks with Rihanna, Dua Lipa and The Weeknd) has had him struggling to live up to expectations to be the “cool guy”. But now, he says, he’s found comfort in facing up to all of his perceived social and emotional failings in the lyrics to this record.
To that end, Deadbeat starts intimate and confessional, with what might be the best opening track of the year. “My Old Ways” is a song that lets fans into the rawness of the rehearsal room before the production elevates intimacy into euphoria. We meet Parker at an echoey keyboard, bashing out a hypnotic hook beneath a quavering falsetto while he beats himself up over a lapse into unspecified bad habits. “Wish I had someone else to blame,” he laments, as he gives in to “temptation once again… always f***ing up to something”. The raw, soulful piano hook is then lifted – like that classic Ike Turner sample on Jurassic 5’s “Concrete Streets” – into a wider screen production swelled with muscular bass and a thumping squash ball-against-a-wall of a 4/4 beat. Vintage synths lock in with sweet’n’sour fizz and ping.
From there, the tracks flow and blend hypnotically, tied together by the piano. Sometimes a song’s coherence is sacrificed to tranceyness, but hooks keep bobbing to the surface like lava lamp bubbles. “No Reply” picks up the pace as Parker’s self-recrimination flips out into a public mea culpa for a catalogue of social faux pas. “Was I impolite? Was that joke alright?” he asks, with a melancholy dryness of tone that recalls New Order’s Bernard Sumner. But we’ve all been there, haven't we? It’s easy to relate to the singer’s wincing regret that feeling “uptight and preoccupied” meant he forgot to ask an interlocutor “about the things you like… your 9-5/ I just want to seem like a normal guy”.
He has a bit more fun making a monster-sized mountain out of the social awkwardness molehill over the squelchy bass of “Dracula” (a track that sounds like it could have been written, alongside Houdini, for Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism album). There’s a strutting funk to “Loser”, whose chorus “I’m a loser, baby” doesn’t include a melodic nod to Beck, but “Not My World” allows itself to drift from echoey alleyway musings to sink fully fanged into the kind of cover of Jackson’s “Thriller” you might imagine played by an arcade game with a particularly robust bass speaker. The Halloween hit also runs through the more forgettable “Afterthought”.
Slower songs such as “Oblivion” (like a vaporous Vampire Weekend), “Piece of Heaven” (has he borrowed Enya’s keyboard?) and “Obsolete” (Eighties drum pads with sampled exhalations) can float by forgettably on the first few hearings, but their sketchiness diffuses pleasantly into the brain. Deadbeat closes less memorably than it begins with the spacey but feral seven-minute rave “End of Summer”. By now, Parker’s rehearsal room insecurities have truly surrendered to the clubby mix. “Right now I would love to put my arms around you,” he sings. If the knotty little hooks melt away with the anxiety, maybe that means his project is working.
English (US) ·