Tame ImpalaEurope's The Final Countdown is being played on trumpet somewhere. Turning toward the source of the brass blasts, we discover the culprit – it's Santa! Hanging out the passenger window of a white van sharing good tidings. Ho-ho-ho. Fellow West Australian band The Growl make sure everything's working well on Tame Impala's stage and Cleaver Lever bucks and gnaws like Jackson Firebird duelling with The Bad Seeds. It's cacophonous and inspiring, but the band comes across as a little too green tonight. Leave the banter until you've built the audience perhaps.
There's Tame Impala flip-flops for sale at the merch, which is an apt inclusion that sums up the personal style of these psych heroes. Kevin Parker is a boy genius, there's no doubting that. The five-piece belong in this venue and you'd swear the Romanesque statues were grinning in appreciation. The old-school, two-tone visuals could be doodled live, straight on transparencies under a projector lens – as retro as slinkies. What does this band's music sound like? A massage for your soul. Parker's forlorn vocals throughout It Is Not Meant To Be make you wanna rush up and give him a reassuring cuddle. His is such a casual, economical guitar-playing style he's like a musical ventriloquist, leaving us wondering where the superlative riffs emanate from. Jay Watson's extended psychedelic key freak-outs make you wanna change into a paisley muu-muu immediately. Where's Nick Allbrook? He really is the band's invisible mascot, disappearing behind amps and lighting towers up there. And then that marauding Elephant storms through the set, “Shaking its big grey trunk for the hell of it”. Of course there are puffs of smoke wafting up from the centre of the stalls!
Parker tells us Tame Impala's Facebook band page calculates the city where they've got the most fans in the world and guess what? It's Melbourne Rock City. Yeah-yah! A couple of M-Cat casualties collapse in one of the side aisles while attempting to exit the venue and security choose to merely observe as the squatting couple pray for a trapdoor to swallow them up. Tame Impala are a totally different experience live, inserting jazzy experimental jams within songs and then cranking back into the main melody as if conducted by a lightning bolt. An example of this is Desire Be Desire Go, which has a totally different musical wedge spliced in the middle – show-offs. A simple, “This is our last song” is mumbled before we're flung headfirst into Apocalypse Dreams. All are swaying in blissful states: “Am I getting closer?/Will I ever get there?/Does it really matter?” Oh, you took us there all right, dudes.
They're not the encore fake-out types, so we rack off to the foyer to snap up a copy of Tame Impala's latest Lonerism album on vinyl (each) before they sell out. But then the band starts up again! A mega extended mix of Half Full Glass Of Wine makes us drunk with delight. Tame Impala: they'll make you swell with national pride – extracting the best aspects from your vintage faves and propelling these shards of wonderment squarely (or through a fractal) into the future.
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