Australian musician Kevin Parker, under the moniker of Tame Impala, has struck a curious balance between mainstream appeal and flourishing in his own indie niche. His success in that goldilocks zone can be attributed, at least in part, toward his more recent work’s electro-pop appeal. Tame Impala’s earliest output skewed toward fuzzed-out, retro-psychedelic rock, and while Parker’s strong melodicism and trippy predilections were already full-formed in that early work, it was only after the release of poppier albums like Currents or its successor The Slow Rush that the greater part of the masses started to take notice. His upcoming album Deadbeat looks by all accounts to continue this trend and then some, with promotional statements naming the album’s influences as being “bush doof” culture and the Western Australian rave scene. Its first single “End of Summer,” for instance, was all but a club track. The more recently released “Loser” is also distinctly electronica-driven, though of a more chart-friendly vein. “Loser” tells a classic Parkerian tale of self-deprecation and desperation, set to an infectious coastal beat.
“Loser” has something of a western feel to it under the hood, characterized by a steady, almost statically insistent groove and punctuated with deliberate rhythmic strikes a la Parker’s recent hit “Borderline.” Sitting atop are Latin-esque electric and acoustic guitar riffs in harmony, punctuated by some plucky synthesizer blips. Parker’s signature, delay-saturated falsetto and self-harmonizing take up the lions share of the sonic image, curating an almost droning atmosphere that matches the song’s themes of dejection. The entire production is lightly steeped in a warm, crackly distortion, recalling the heavily-saturated feel of Tame Imapala’s other work while also brining a kind lo-fi quality to the whole affair.
The video for “Loser” is a straightforward little story vignette featuring actor Joe Keery of Stranger Things fame (who is himself a popular musician under his artist name “Djo”). The video is set in a washed-out, palm-tree laden coastal environ, and sees Keery’s character whiling away a day after being spurned by an ostensible romantic liaison. He shambles over to a convenience store to purchase a soda and swipes a lighter, and the majority of the video follows him whiling away the day on the sidewalk directly outside doing much of nothing, fidgeting with stray papers and co-opting half-smoked cigarettes. For a brief second toward the close, Keery’s character is replaced by Parker, tying the superficially unrelated events of the video’s spartan narrative back into the song proper. The video’s muted colors and ambling, lackadaisical narrative nicely illustrate the tune’s pervasive aural and lyrical sense of malaise.