Tame Impala Go Dancing in the Dark

The last couple decades have been lousy with bearded musical visionaries. Yet despite all that heavy traffic, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker has easily carved own his own unique lane. He’s the Australian sonic explorer with the stretchy falsetto and plush, funky space-rock style whose studio scientist skills have landed him gigs sculpting tracks alongside some of pop’s biggest names — from Rihanna (Anti) to Lady Gaga (Joanne) to Dua Lipa (last year’s Radical Optimism). This year, his work with French electronic duo Justice won him his first Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Recording. The charm of his main project — heard most famously on his 2015 highpoint, Currents — has been his ability to conjure grand Wall of Sound worlds you can hang out in, a place apart unto himself where Pink Floyd were an AM-bubblegum tune machine and Prince was a big My Bloody Valentine fan.

Parker has always seemed to amiably float along in his retro-futurist space cloud. But he’s a 39-year-old dad now, and Deadbeat, his first LP since 2020’s The Slow Rush, has the feel of a guy honestly trying to pilot a reality that’s a little closer to the ground. There’s always been an ambivalent aftertaste to Tame Impala (their second album is called Lonerism, and its biggest song was ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards”), and that sense feels even more earnestly up front here.

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Album opener “My Old Ways” finds him alone at his piano in what sounds more like a sad basement than an expensive recording space. “So here I am once again/Feel no good/I must be out of excuses/I knew I would,” Parker croons, exuding a genuine sense of openhearted distress. On “No Reply,” against a churning lo-fi beat and a pretty if somewhat downcast array of keyboard illuminations, he sings about staying home and watching Family Guy while his friends are all out having a good time. When he does go out on the sleek synth-bop “Dracula,” a long night of partying only reminds how alone he is without something realer and deeper to come home to: “My friends are saying, ‘Shut up Kevin, just get in the car’/I just wanna be right where you are.” The next song is a Beck-citing strut called “Loser,” in which he sings, “So much for closure, I lost composure/I get the message, I learned my lesson.”

Parker’s preternatural sense of how to spool out an elegiacally kiting melody remains wholly intact, even if the music here mostly pares down the soft-serve epics he does so well to remake his sound into what he calls “a kind of a future primitive rave act.” That especially comes through on mind-cleansing house hallucinations like “Ethereal Connection” and “End of Summer,” both of which bang and burble past the seven-minute mark.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t pop majesty here too. “Oblivion” rolls along beautifully, needing not much more than sweet keyboard squirts, a buoyantly shuffling groove, and Parker’s dappled falsetto refracted around the track like sunlight through a waterfall. The smooth, moody confections “Obsolete” and “Piece of Heaven” find him in an Eighties R&B bag. The latter hits an especially splendid note: It’s a tender slow jam where he sings about finding solace in your messy bedroom over a bright, swooping melody, suggesting Brian Wilson under the influence of Marvin Gaye’s Midnight Love. “This room is a shambles/But I think it’s fine,” Parker sings.

That’s a meaningful admission coming from a guy who often seems like a musical perfectionist. Deadbeat might often come off like an album about feeling engulfed by life. But there’s plenty of hard-earned grace here, too.

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