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deadbeat This is the title that Kevin Parker has chosen for his fifth album tame Impala Surname. But after hearing one day the way 39 year old Australian presents their social and emotional struggles over catchy piano hooks and rubberized dance beats (both inspired by and quoting Michael Jackson) thriller), I’ve come to think of trippy bop-able records this way: Imposter syndrome discos.
In an in-depth interview for gq This year, Parker spoke candidly about his difficult childhood, which led him to live in different homes as his parents separated, reconciled and then separated again, resulting in him and his brother having to live in an outhouse for long periods of time in his teenage years. The child who once spent hours meticulously crafting intricate Lego worlds grew into a teenager equally obsessed with building otherworldly soundscapes. He suspected that no one would want to join the band with him. Over the past 20 years, he’s transitioned from prog-rock loner to mainstream pop producer par excellence (turning out bouncy-sharp dance hooks with Rihanna, dua lipa and The Weeknd) have struggled to live up to expectations of him being a “cool guy”. But now, he says, he has found solace in confronting all his perceived social and emotional failures in the songs on this record.
to that end, deadbeat starts off intimate and confessional, which may be the best opening track of the year. “My Old Ways” is a song that lets fans into the rawness of the rehearsal room before turning intimacy into excitement during production. We meet Parker at an echoey keyboard, plucking out a hypnotic hook beneath a tremulous falsetto, while he beats himself up over lapses in unspecified bad habits. “I wish I had someone else to blame,” he laments, because he is “once again tempted… always to do something”. The raw, soulful piano hook is then lifted – like that classic Ike Turner sample from Jurassic 5’s “Concrete Streets” – into a wide-screen production, replete with muscular bass and squash balls thumping against a wall of 4/4 beats. Vintage synths lock in with sweet and sour fizz and ping.
From there, the tracks flow and mix hypnotically, tied together by the piano. Sometimes a song’s coherence is sacrificed for playfulness, but the hooks continue to bubble to the surface like bubbles from a lava lamp. “No Reply” picks up steam as Parker’s self-incrimination turns into a public tirade for a catalog of social wrongs. “Was I rude? Was that joke okay?” he asks with a melancholy dryness in his voice, reminiscent of New Order’s Bernard Sumner. But we’ve all been there, right? It’s easy to relate to the singer’s regret that feeling “sad and busy” meant he forgot to ask an interlocutor about “things you like… your 9-5/I just want to seem like a normal person”.
He has a little more fun making a monster-shaped mountain out of social awkwardness over the raucous bass of “Dracula” (a track that sounds like it could have been written for Dua Lipa, along with Houdini). radical optimism album). “Loser” has a swaggering funk, whose chorus “I’m a loser, baby” doesn’t include a sweet nod to Beck, but “Not My World” allows itself to drift off into Echo Alley musings and become completely immersed in a cover of Jackson’s “Thriller,” which you can imagine being played by an arcade game with a particularly strong bass speaker. The Halloween hit also runs through the more forgettable “Afterthoughts.”
Slower songs like “Oblivion” (like a vaporous Vampire Weekend), “Pieces of Heaven” (did he borrow Enya’s keyboard?) and “Obsolete” (eighties drum pads with sampled exhales) may float by mistake on the first few listens, but their sketchiness lingers pleasantly in the brain. deadbeat It ends less memorably than it began with “Summer’s End”, a sprawling but wild seven-minute rendition. By now, Parker’s rehearsal room insecurities have practically surrendered to the clubby mix. He sings, “Right now I’d love to put my arms around you.” If the knotted little thorns melt away with worry, maybe it means his project is working.