Kevin Parker walks onstage looking like he overslept, disappears mid-show for a filmed toilet break, and then lies on his back on a rug in the crowd singing to the ceiling. None of this is accidental. The whole Deadbeat tour is built around a deliberately deflated stage presence — the man-at-home-doing-laundry performer inside the most eye-obliterating production in contemporary arena rock. The tension between those two things is the show's central argument, and whether it resolves is a different question. The lighting and laser rig is the real headline. This is not arena-show-good; it is genuinely psychedelic, the kind of visual overload that achieves something rare: the ego-dissolving sensation that Tame Impala's best records aim for actually being present in the room. For the band's older catalog — the chunky psychedelia of Elephant, the rolling trance architecture of Let It Happen — it is a near-perfect delivery system. Drummer Julien Barbagallo rattles rib cages. Parker's voice, live, is more plaintive and more ethereal than the records suggest. Sixth member James Ireland of Pond rounds the band into something muscular and strange. The problem is Deadbeat itself, and this is worth saying plainly: it is a melancholic album that does not coexist peacefully with what came before it. Live, the new material sounds like a separate, quieter show that keeps interrupting the other one. Loser has a sinister bounce that works; Dracula predictably destroys the room. But Piece of Heaven, No Reply, and Obsolete fall flat between the confetti cannons, and the small-stage interlude — Parker cross-legged on a rug, then lying down, then singing to the ceiling for too long — empties a large portion of the arena toward the bathrooms. The irony is not subtle. The Deadbeat tour began nearly a year ago in the US and has finally arrived in Australia for 12 arena dates, ending in Perth, Parker's home city. The Brisbane opener carried visible emotional weight — Parker told the crowd he wouldn't go on about it, then clearly meant it when he said playing these shows at home was genuinely special. Support act Ninajirachi's frenetic glitchy EDM functions as the evening's uppers to Tame Impala's downers, and occasionally you can feel some of that energy bleeding into the older tracks. Elephant and Let It Happen take on a darker industrial tone this time around, which is a welcome evolution. But the tonal ricochet is the show's unresolved structural problem. Euphoric confetti-cannon pop and sad-floor interludes are not natural neighbors, and even a willing crowd — and this one was genuinely willing, singing guitar solos note-for-note like football chants — struggles to ride the shifts. The two-hour show closes not on Dracula, the recent mega-hit, but on the seven-minute acid house track End of Summer. It is a downbeat ending for a tour called Deadbeat, which is either a conceptual statement or an uneasy choice, and the show leaves you unsure which. What the Deadbeat tour is, definitively, is a spectacle that needs to be seen. The production alone earns the ticket price. What it is not, yet, is a live show that has fully absorbed its newest album into its own identity. Parker is still figuring out how Deadbeat fits inside the larger Tame Impala argument, and watching him work that out in arenas — with a rug, a camera at the urinal, and enough lasers to correct the vision of everyone present — is its own kind of event.
