In May, Dua Lipa introduced a special guest at her Sydney gig: Kevin Parker, who duetted with her on a version of The Less I Know the Better, the biggest hit Parker has ever released under the name Tame Impala. The pair have a longstanding creative relationship – Parker co-produced and co-wrote most of Dua Lipa’s last album, Radical Optimism – but nevertheless made for quite the study in contrasts. She was resplendent in a glittering lace catsuit, stiletto-heeled boots, a fake fur stole draped over her shoulder. Lank-haired, clad in a baggy multicoloured cardigan and a string of wooden beads, Parker looked not unlike a man who had arrived onstage direct from a very long night up at Glastonbury’s stone circle.
You could see it as a visual metaphor for Parker’s unlikely journey to pop’s upper echelons which began, improbably enough, while he was listening to the Bee Gees while tripping on magic mushrooms. The experience prompted him to pivot away from the guitar-led psychedelia of Tame Impala’s first two albums and embrace his love of “sugary pop music” on 2015’s Currents. As evidenced by the success of its single The Less I Know the Better – 2bn streams on Spotify and counting – the record vastly outsold Tame Impala’s previous work. Moreover, a succession of mainstream pop stars decided they wanted some of what it had to offer. Parker subsequently worked with Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Travis Scott and the Weeknd among others. Last year, he cropped up on the Australian Financial Review’s list of his homeland’s richest under-40s.
As his appearance with Lipa attested, Parker seems to have achieved all this with enviable ease and insouciance, but the contents of Deadbeat make you wonder. There’s always been a melancholy undertow to his Tame Impala work: one theory about the success of Currents was that the sound of Parker’s yearning voice, adrift on a bed of electronics, chimed with a very contemporary malaise, the fear that technology is making us more isolated. But here, he sounds more disconsolate than ever.
You could read the first Tame Impala album in five years as a treatise on trying to balance success with some kind of normality, the disjunction between the demands of fame and domesticity. On Dracula, he’s riddled with self-loathing for enjoying himself like “fucking Pablo Escobar” when he should be at home. On Piece of Heaven, he seems to be in his children’s bedroom, haunted by his absence from their lives: “I don’t know if I’ll be here / I guess that depends.” “Waking in time to catch the last hours of sunlight / People walking home go by,” he sings on Not My World. But if that sounds like the bohemian dream of unshackling oneself from the nine-to-five-grind writ large, he doesn’t seem to be enjoying it much: “Must be nice,” he muses, sadly. “Makes me realise it’s not my world.”
Parker has said that the primary influence on Deadbeat is western Australia’s “bush doof” rave scene, which explains the preponderance of banging four-four beats: Ethereal Connection boasts a particularly fierce example. He clearly has an affinity with dance music, handy with a writhing electronic bass line and a subtle tapestry of shifting electronic sounds. But occasionally, you wish he’d left certain songs as instrumentals: the impact of Afterthought feels reduced by the pop melody he’s placed on top of it. Indeed, if Deadbeat has a flaw, it’s the occasional sense that Parker’s pop leanings feel a little forced this time around. The simple see-sawing melody of No Reply wears thin before the track ends. Closing track End of Summer hits an enviable sweet spot between dancefloor euphoria and rainwashed sadness, but it’s jolted by Parker deploying a noisome sped-up vocal hook: an earworm, but the kind of earworm you wish you could shake.
More striking than the album’s dance influence is how often the music mirrors the unsettled and disrupted tone of the lyrics. Both My Old Ways and No Reply jump between the gleaming end product and what appear to be their haltingly played piano demo versions. On Loser and Obsolete, Parker’s vocals are interrupted by off-mic sighs and exclamations, the kind of stuff that you might have expected to be edited out of the finished track: “Fuck!” he snaps in apparent exasperation as the former ends. Oblivion, meanwhile, sounds like a disparate collection of misty electronic sounds – ideas, even – over a dembow beat, which suddenly snap into focus when it reaches the chorus.
The effect is like someone drawing back the curtain to reveal the music’s inner workings: you think it’s like that, but it’s actually like this. That could be the motto of an album that keeps suggesting everything isn’t as it might seem. If it’s occasionally confused, it’s also painfully honest and genuinely wracked: you leave it hoping the man who made it is OK.
This week Alexis listened to
Skullcrusher – Living
New York singer-songwriter Helen Ballentine’s stage name might be the least appropriate in pop history: Living is gently wistful, driven by acoustic guitar and piano, and utterly lovely.
