Of all the recent musical trends nobody could have predicted – Taylor Swift going folk, The Cure’s Robert Smith going on stage with Olivia Rodrigo – surely the most baffling has been the rise and rise of Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker.
Emerging from the deep desert of Western Australia like an indie-disco version of Timothée Chalamet in Dune, Parker has parlayed a talent for blissful prog-pop into a skyscraping career. He has collaborated with Dua Lipa, headlined Electric Picnic and written songs for Rihanna and Lady Gaga – a gold-plated bucket list where every last entry has been ticked off with gimlet-eyed relish.
Yet that ascent is hugely unlikely when you consider that Parker is operating in the unpromising milieu of pastoral, post-Brian Wilson indie. Choruses are buried under mountains of reverb, melodies are supersaccharine. Parker’s singing voice suggests a Smurf tripping on something stronger than Nando’s hot sauce. It’s wigged out, chilled out and crying out for cult obscurity rather than the fame to which he has been catapulted.
If all of this feels far-fetched to passersby, then rest assured that it’s hugely confusing to Parker too, at least judging by the air of bewilderment and occasional guilt that ripples through his first Tame Impala album in five years.
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He staggers through the thumpingly underwhelming and drearily repetitive Deadbeat in a condition of more or less permanent perturbation. The recurring question is whether he’s worthy of his gilded status. He worries that he isn’t and that fame is turning him into a recluse who only comes out at night, as on the single Dracula.
“Deadbeat is a feeling of being behind the eight ball in life and in the world, of not being able to get your sh*t together, of being an inferior human,” he told GQ recently.
Making peace with one’s deadbeatness is hugely freeing, he went on to say. “If I can walk into a room of people and they know that I’m a deadbeat, that I’m a f***ing piece of shit, then I’m going to have a better time. The expectation for me to be the guy with his shit together is gone.”
It’s a solid premise for an album: embrace your flaws, turn them into a virtue and see what happens next. But while Parker’s struggles with his sense of self may be fascinating (to Parker, anyway), they aren’t quite enough to elevate the present incarnation of Tame Impala above the level of an arena-filling novelty act. That is the status in which they seem frozen across this forgettable record.
The problem is that one Tame Impala song inevitably sounds much like the next. They are humdrum exercises in maximalism. Again and again, psychedelic arrangements serve as threadbare featherbeds for Parker’s identikit singing voice. He always sounds the same, no matter the subject at hand (there are allusions here towards a difficult childhood) or whether he is supposedly happy, sad, devastated or ebullient.
The biggest departure is right at the start, with My Old Ways, where Parker croons over a grainy piano line, “So here I am once again, feeling all blue.” His gripe is one that recurs across popular music. An artist has success beyond their wildest imagination, only to find that their demons remain and that wealth and fame have not cured their melancholy – may have magnified it, in fact.
He plunges deeper into gloom on Dracula. The single is a vapid piece of psychedelic fizz where the music is too slight to shoulder the heavy portrait Parker paints of a lonely figure so caught up in himself that he can’t tell day from night any more (“I’m on the verge of caving in, I run back through the dark”).
There are glimmers of self-awareness. On Loser, Parker references the chorus to Beck’s grunge classic from 1993 (“I’m a loser, babe”), in a flash of humour sadly absent from the rest of the LP.
Deadbeat is at its best when it pushes past the angst and concerns itself solely with spectacle. The best example is the no-frills banger Ethereal Connection, a trance onslaught that hits like a Millennial updating of Insomnia, by Faithless. It’s one of the few moments a sleepy-eyed record feels fully awake – a Deadbeat come to life, but far too fleetingly to make this underwhelming affair worth the time.
