It’s been five years between albums for Tame Impala. In the intervening years between 2020’s The Slow Rush and Deadbeat the multi-instrumentalist behind the project, Kevin Parker, has also become a husband and a father, making the choice of name for the album an interesting one indeed.
Following on from the huge success of earlier albums like Currents, Lonerism and Innerspeaker, it’s fair to say that fans now have high expectations for a Tame Impala album, and the occasional departure this time around from a very recognisable sound featuring a heavy use of distortion pedals and Bee Gees inspired falsetto vocals may come as a shock to the faithful. But a lot has happened since Tame Impala first hit the scene in 2007 – aside from the changes in his personal life, Kevin Parker has also seen his music widely covered, including by children’s mega-band The Wiggles, whose cover of ‘Elephant’ topped the Like a Version Hottest 100 countdown in 2022.
To listen to from start to finish, Deadbeats follows an intriguing progression of sounds, with the first two tracks almost giving the impression that the listener is getting to watch Kevin Parker in his studio, sitting at a piano and feeling his way through the songwriting process. Tellingly, the first track is titled ‘My Old Ways’ and it has the bare bones of a Tame Impala sound, featuring repetitive loops of sound, but the vocals are stripped back. The signature distortion is absent for the first part of the track, building in slowly as the song gets going, as if Parker is trying to find his way back into his old ways, literally, and reconnect with the version of himself that wrote the Tame Impala hits we know and love.
Perhaps the issue with having such a signature sound is that it’s a fine line between giving people the sound that they want without opening yourself up to accusations of rehashing the same song over and over again. Listening to Deadbeats, it’s easy to imagine Parker grappling with how to keep things fresh and new without straying too far from what has made him hits in the past. The variety of sounds throughout the 12 songs on the album may at times feel incongruous, with some tracks even seeming out of place on a listen-through – but then again, with people’s listening habits changing in the age of streaming, perhaps that was the point.
The songs seem to explore different eras and styles of music, with influences from Enya to the Arctic Monkeys, to rave and trance music and DJ sets, popping up in places. The fourth track, ‘Loser’, sounds so much like an Arctic Monkeys song that it almost prompted me to dig out my copy of AM to listen to right after.
The first single from the album, ‘Dracula’, is an absolute highlight of the album – fun, a little out there, but it sounds like the natural evolution of Tame Impala hits, and you can chart a progression from recent more commercially palatable hits like ‘The Less I Know The Better’ (Currents) and ‘Breathe Deeper’ (The Slow Rush). Beneath its poppy, catchy tune, however, the lyrics contain much self-criticism and speak to a sense of weariness – themes that continue throughout the album, regardless of if the songs are high or low tempo. Recent years may have not given us an album, but Parker has been busy, writing music for soundtracks like Barbie and Dungeons and Dragons, and he’s even been working with Dua Lipa. Perhaps it’s all beginning to catch up with him, or perhaps he just wanted to evolve his sound. We probably will never know.
Other standout tracks include ‘Loser’, ‘Oblivion’, ‘Piece of Heaven’ and ‘Obsolete’ – but you do have to push through some runs of less traditional Tame Impala songs that feel more like DJ sets to find them. This album feels like an exercise in re-discovery, both for the musician and for the listener, as Kevin Parker explores what it means to be a musician, and potentially to balance this with where he’s at in his life now. I never knew while listening whether I should be dancing or crying from one track to the next, but I was compelled to see this album through to the end, and I think it’s going to be one that grows on me over time, with much to discover on each re-listen.
FOUR STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Deadbeat is out now.
