When I was eleven years old, I got my hands on one of the most important things I’ve ever discovered, Kevin Parker’s music. I remember being awe-struck by the complexity of Tame Impala’s Lonerism—I had never heard music like that before. The blending of old-school psych-rock— the likes of The Beatles, The 13th Floor Elevators, and Dungen, but molded with these very intentionally constructed Juno-106 synth lines and saturated 60s drum tones; it was beautiful, innovative, and creative.
Parker has always been a musical pioneer, creating something new out of things you hear daily—that’s what drew me to his work. I was utterly blown away by his last record, 2020’s The Slow Rush. It seemed that Parker was spearheading a new movement, new music, a new scene. His sound has constantly evolved and pushed bounds. Words couldn’t describe the feelings that bubbled up when I heard he was working on a new record, Deadbeat—the first one in five years.
The lead single off the record, “Dracula,” opens with a hooky synth warp and strangely modern organ, all wrapped around a drum beat that sounds as if it were compiled with a mosaic of free GarageBand loops. For a musician who is infamous for having a very discernible drum sound, this is underwhelming. “Dracula” has an excruciatingly bland chorus that I can see industry-forged TikTok trends adoring. Parker sings:
“In the end, I hope it’s you and me/In the darkness, I would never leave.”
This song seems to be the ‘hit’ of the record; it’s not bad for something you might hear while shopping at Claire’s, but for Tame Impala, it seems to be a cop-out.
The second track, “No Reply,” has lyrics that sound like the product of an inebriated ChatGPT session:
“You’re a cinephile, I watch Family Guy/On a Friday night, off a rogue website.”
Parker, who wrote “The Less I Know The Better” and “Eventually” is now singing about pirating Family Guy in a ring-around-the-rosie cadence.
“End Of Summer,” the final track on the album, is decent progressive ethereal house. In all honesty, like a good house track should be, it’s incredibly hooky and danceable. Nonetheless, I feel it’s not fit for a grating seven minutes. I think this song raises the question: Will Tame Impala make another album like Currents or The Slow Rush? Probably not.
But even in the dregs of this record, there are a few good tracks; take “My Old Ways,” with a criminally catchy piano line and equally bouncy synth hook. This song is what I thought of when I heard about a Tame Impala house record. It’s clever and mixes genres in that classic ‘Impala way.
Like the Roman Empire, great things don’t always last forever. It seems that the grandeur of Parker’s seemingly impermeable catalogue has, at last, fallen. Personally, I would skip out on this record and cross my fingers that Parker’s next piece of work is stitched together more coherently.
