Can you be the frontman of a real rock band without half of David Bowie’s magnetism, Springsteen or Bono’s charisma, or without doing Iggy Pop’s repetitive crowd surfing and stage antics? I am bringing up very high profile characters here, but when there are ambitious settings and big outdoor concerts, this idea necessarily comes to mind, and without any of these big features, can a young band’s performance rise to everyone’s expectation? When I saw Tame Impala at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Friday night, the crowd was dense, the stage and the lights as impressive as they could be, and the band’s performance intense and thrilling… still, Kevin Parker looked like the most reluctant rockstar ever, a shy frontman, who at the top of his band’s triumphant set, could only say ‘Thank you guys!’ Still, he was visibly moved by the experience, telling the crowd it was ‘the best experience of his life’, an ‘amazing’ moment he would ‘remember forever’, as if playing in a cemetery with the view on the Hollywood sign was the consecration of his young career.
Tame Impala had two consecutive and sold out dates at Hollywood Forever, and they received the star treatment from a very enthusiastic crowd, during a fantastic show, making a majestic entry with a white veil and a projection of laser and lights show during the intro, which continued during their entire set, accompanying each song with fog machines and rainbow lights, giving a new name to psychedelia.
Tame Impala is a young band, with only 3 albums under their sleeve, and a new one ‘Currents’ to promote, but they were playing it cool, not forcing this new one under our throats, playing only five new songs out of a set of 16, and pleasing the crowd with their hits such as ‘Apocalypse Dreams’, ‘Elephant’, and especially ‘Feels Like we only go Backwards’ during the encore, which turned into a 4,000 people sing-along.
The whole show seemed like a repetitive explosion of rainbows, with multicolor lights reverberating in the fog, giving us some kaleidoscopic visions and the tie-dye ambiance of the 70’s, but at the same time there was nothing nostalgic in Tame Impala’s show, it was as modern as it was electronic, and the vocals were so deep in the mix you couldn’t discern them from the rest of the expanding and layered sound. Song after song, the reverb music hypnotized everyone and made us enter doppler tunnel after doppler tunnel during an imaginary LSD trip or made us float between several sun-drenched currents,… and the strangest thing is that there were real dance rhythms in the middle of this acid-inundated jaunt. However, the whole thing stayed gentle, the crowd was in total ecstasy and wasn’t even try to push, surf and do any eccentricity beside the casual arm-waving during a sing along. The songs were too sweet for any violence and beside a short episode during ‘Elephant’, which apparently became an opportunity for a bearded drunk gay couple to push us to gain access to the front, the whole evening bathed into synth swirls of serenity and contemplation. Everything seemed amplified, with moments of bliss, as the band was stretching the songs with experimentation, and some stop and start, alternating sweet vocals with big sonic explosions, getting close to Michael Jackson-esque R&B during ‘Cause I am a Man’, adding some Flaming Lips-like electronic glitches at other moments.
They are not a band with a lot of truly memorable songs, sure they have some earworms like ‘Elephant’ and ‘Backwards’, but most of their songs are sonic journeys into reverb and psychedelia. They even don’t seem to want to be known for a few specific anthems, as they treat every track with the same complex celebration. And may be I am wrong about a frontman’s presence, there was a majority of young people around us and this generation is not looking for any big leader with charisma and big discourses, they were here for some instant gratification and the joy of a live experience, hanging out with Miley Cyrus who was apparently spotted enjoying a picnic party in the back of the lawn of the cemetery… There was not a misstep during Tame Impala’s 2-hour long set, they received only adoration from the audience and Kevin Parker got close to the crowd during the last minute, and I almost thought he would do a crowd bath, I think he just shook a few hands, before they all walked away leaving everyone in a psychedelic haze that still persists this morning.
Setlist
Intro
Let it Happen
Mind Mischief
Why Won’t You Make up your Mind
Why Won’t They Talk To Me?
It Isn’t Meant to Be
The Moment
Elephant
Be Above it/Jam
Eventually
Oscilly
Cause I’m a man
Less I know the better
Alter Ego
Apocalypse Dreams
Encore
Feels Like we only go Backwards
Nothing That has happened so far has been anything we could control
