Fans sing along to synthesiser riffs as lustily as if they were terrace chants. What Tame Impala are doing is certainly working, though. The festival’s second-stage headliners Caribou, another band built around a soft-voiced bedroom producer, provide more moments of transcendent intensity. While Breathe Deeper climaxes with an acidic blast from the Roland 303, the piano-house romp Patience and siren-blaring It Might Be Time are mystifyingly absent from a set that could use a bit more dancefloor muscle. He could probably afford to lean harder into that quadrant of Tame Impala’s sound. “Are you ready?” Screams and confetti ensue. “There’s a drop coming,” Parker says, endearingly carried away by his own song. “I thought this day would never come.”Īt first Tame Impala coast a little on vibes and spectacle but the energy spikes with the glam-rock ruckus of Elephant, as lasers fan out across the field like a peacock’s tail, and explodes during the Daft Punk-y colossus Let It Happen. “I can’t tell you how fucking long I’ve waited for this,” he says with feeling.
This return to London, then, has been a long time coming. It was all too ironic for a record about how time always seems to pass too quickly or too slowly. As soon as it finally came out, in February 2020, the pandemic put Tame Impala on ice. That show was intended to promote his fourth album, The Slow Rush, but it wasn’t ready yet (perfectionism is a beast). His five-man live show, meanwhile, has become enough of a draw to headline Coachella in 2019 when Justin Timberlake dropped out, where they staged such an expensively brain-melting production that Parker actually lost money. Now he’s the platinum-selling producer called on to make a song with Diana Ross for the soundtrack to Despicable Me 3 and remix Elvis for Baz Luhrmann. Kevin Parker, a genial Australian with a laissez-faire look that might be described as surfer rave Jesus, started out in the late 2000s as a one-man psychedelic rock band who pretended he didn’t play every note himself because he worried he wasn’t interesting enough to be a solo artist. W hat an unusual proposition Tame Impala are.
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