It seemed as though a spacecraft was waking up, its engines humming to life.
For Tame Impala’s current arena tour, the production centers on a circular stage set right in the middle of the floor. Kevin Parker’s bandmates stay stationed up there for the entire show—sometimes visible, sometimes veiled by video screens—while Parker spends the night circling the outer edge of the circle. At times he grabs a guitar and plants himself at a microphone stand. At others he moves with a sly, unshowy ease, still not exuding classic pop-star charisma but looking more at home in the role. There are even moments when he strays from the stage, including a mid‑set interlude that the cameras follow into the bathroom for a quick bathroom break.
The production is striking. Even years later, I’m still ambivalent about Parker’s gradual shift from a generation‑defining psych‑rock auteur into an electronic‑dance experimenter and pop hit‑maker. Yet the show he’s delivering now helps his assorted eras coexist as a single, unified vision, and it underscores how many exceptional tunes he’s amassed over the years. On a Tuesday night before a packed Nationwide Arena in Columbus, he opened the next leg of this tour with a spectacle that largely masked the project’s weaknesses. If Parker’s strength lies in lavish artifice rather than intimate depth, this tour piles on the spectacle to a thrilling extent.
I was taken aback that the evening began with “Apocalypse Dreams,” a holographic ‘60s pastiche from the 2012 psych odyssey Lonerism that launched the journey. I was even more surprised by how naturally it flowed into “Borderline,” the space‑age funk‑pop track from 2020’s The Slow Rush that can make any room feel like a glossy retail space. Perhaps the most surprising moment was when they slipped the dance‑rock epic “Let It Happen”—long a clear choice to open or close a Tame Impala show—into the middle of the set, proof that they now possess a chest full of bigger hits. That number was accompanied by confetti blasts as usual; they refilled the cannons and fired them twice more later in the night.
Throughout the night, dance‑pop cuts like “Breathe Deeper” hit as hard as rockers like “Elephant,” though nothing matched the sheer thunder of the reverse‑prom, slow‑dance breakup anthem “Eventually,” which finally reached its full splendor in this laser‑lit arena production. The pop textures of early favorites such as “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” and “Alter Ego” also came to the fore, so they blended smoothly with the less guitar‑driven tracks. By the time he encored with the breakout pop hit “Dracula,” the bass‑heavy streaming sensation “The Less I Know The Better” (2.5 billion streams and counting on Spotify), and the brisk, booming rave anthem “End Of Summer,” it was clear how sharply Parker’s vision had come into focus.
The night wasn’t completely free of dull moments, largely due to material from last year’s undercooked Deadbeat. Yet many moments that might have felt tedious—especially the two‑song instrumental segment that followed Parker’s bathroom break, where he stretched out on a rug on an auxiliary stage, surrounded by lamps and gear as if tinkering in his living room—were redeemed by stunning videography that gave every moment a cinematic aura. Earlier in the evening, when he lay in the middle of the main stage and peered upward at the camera during a particularly dreamy passage, it felt as if he were in bed hallucinating the entire performance.
My appreciation for Tame Impala has tended to hover closer to liking than love—mainly because Parker excels at sculpting brilliant sonic textures more than crafting songs with a deeply intimate emotional center—but Deadbeat was the first album of his I wouldn’t eagerly endorse. As is often the case, it’s also the one that completed his long journey into mainstream stardom. Parker’s work for pop stars has often yielded deep cuts or misfires, and in his own catalog he’s always seemed more comfortable in the studio than onstage. Yet it’s hard to deny that the moves he’s making lately are paying off in a career and commercial sense.
“Dracula,” which initially struck me as a “Borderline”‑style retread eager for Halloween playlists, has emerged as a bona fide pop smash; its remix—a duet with Jennie from Blackpink—climbed all the way to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Loser,” a wonky, guitar‑driven track unlike anything else in Parker’s catalog, reached No. 18. (I’m genuinely curious how many of the kids waving LOSER T‑shirts at the show know the Beck original.) Tame Impala is generating all sorts of Grammy buzz, and on Tuesday night Parker passed along an unverified report that the 18,000-plus attendees set a venue attendance record. After more than a decade and a half of approaching psych‑pop with the rigor of a NASA scientist, Tame Impala has finally 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”
