It looked like a spaceship whirring to life.
For Tame Impala’s current arena tour, the crew constructs a circular stage in the middle of the floor. Kevin Parker’s bandmates remain posted up there throughout the show — sometimes visible, sometimes shrouded by video screens — while Parker spends the night making his way around the exterior of the circle. Sometimes he grabs a guitar and posts up at a microphone stand. Sometimes he slinks around with a mic, still not exuding pop-star charisma but looking more comfortable in the role. Occasionally he wanders away from the stage, including a mid-show interlude where the camera follows him into the bathroom for a pee break.
The production is impressive. All these years later, I’m still not sure how to feel about Parker’s slow evolution from generational psych-rock auteur into electronic dance music dabbler and pop hit-maker. But the show he’s putting on right now helps his various eras to hang together as a unified whole, and it serves as a reminder of how many excellent tunes he’s racked up through the years. Tuesday night at a jam-packed Nationwide Arena in Columbus, he kicked off the next leg of this outing with a spectacle that papered over most of this project’s weaknesses. If Parker specializes in gorgeous artifice rather than depth and substance, this tour piles on the artifice to a thrilling extent.
I was surprised when Tame Impala started the show supporting their beach-doof dance record with “Apocalypse Dreams,” a holographic ‘60s pastiche from 2012 nouveau-psych odyssey Lonerism. I was even more surprised how naturally it segued into “Borderline,” the funky space-age pop track from 2020’s The Slow Rush that can make any room feel like an H&M. Perhaps most surprising of all was when they slotted the dance-rock epic “Let It Happen,” once the most obvious pick to open or close a Tame Impala show, into the middle of the setlist because at this point they have so many bigger hits. That one was accompanied by confetti blasts as usual; they simply reloaded the cannons and deployed them twice more later on.
Throughout the show, dance-pop songs like “Breathe Deeper” hit as hard as rock songs like “Elephant,” though nothing was nearly as thunderous as reverse prom slow dance breakup anthem “Eventually,” finally achieving full splendor in the laser-lit arena show it has always deserved. Similarly, the pop elements of early favorites like “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” and “Alter Ego” came to the fore, so that they blended in neatly with the less guitar-centric songs. By the time he was encoring with the breakthrough pop hit “Dracula,” the bass-blasting streaming sensation “The Less I Know The Better” (2.5 billion and counting on Spotify), and the briskly booming rave track “End Of Summer,” it was evident how clearly Parker’s vision had come into focus.
The night was not without tedium, mostly thanks to material from last year’s undercooked Deadbeat. But many moments that could have been deathly boring — especially the two-song instrumental section that followed Parker’s bathroom break, which found him sprawled on a rug on an auxiliary stage, surrounded by lamps and musical equipment as if fiddling around in his living room — were redeemed by stellar videography that rendered his every moment cinematic. Earlier in the night, when he laid in the middle of the main stage and stared upward at the camera during a particularly dreamy stretch of music, it was as if he was in bed hallucinating the whole show.
Though my appreciation for Tame Impala has usually teetered closer to like than love — largely because Parker is so much better at sculpting brilliant sounds than writing songs with an intimate emotional core — Deadbeat was the first of his albums I would not enthusiastically endorse. As these things so often go, it’s also the one that completed his long transition to mainstream stardom. Parker’s work on behalf of pop stars has usually resulted in deep cuts or flop eras, and in his own career he’s always seemed more comfortable in the studio than onstage. Yet it’s hard to deny the moves he’s been making lately are working in a career/commercial sense.
“Dracula,” which originally struck me as a “Borderline” retread thirsty for Halloween playlist placement, has emerged as a real-deal pop hit; the remix, a duet with Jennie from Blackpink, climbed all the way to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Loser,” a wonky guitar-driven tune unlike anything else in Parker’s catalog, made it to #18. (I’m genuinely curious how many of the kids in the “LOSER” T-shirts they were selling at the gig are familiar with the Beck song.) Tame Impala is getting all kinds of Grammy buzz, and Tuesday night Parker passed along an unverified report that the 18,000+ people present represented an attendance record for the venue. After a decade and a half of approaching psych-pop like a NASA scientist, Tame Impala has achieved liftoff.
SETLIST:
"Apocalypse Dreams"
"Deadbeat Jam"
"Borderline"
"Loser"
"Breathe Deeper"
"Gossip"
"Elephant"
"Afterthought"
"My Old Ways"
"Feels Like We Only Go Backwards"
"No Reply"
"Ethereal Connection"
"Not My World"
"Let It Happen"
"Nangs"
"Alter Ego"
"Piece of Heaven"
"Eventually"
"New Person, Same Old Mistakes"
ENCORE:
"Dracula"
"The Less I Know The Better"
"End Of Summer"
