Tim Hughes enjoys a cosmic ride with Australian psych-rockers Tame impala

  • Tame Impala
  • O2 Academy Oxford

WITH thunderous grungy bass and brain-crunching reverb, Tame Impala have cornered the market in acid-drenched psychedelic rock.

But Kevin Parker’s outfit are masters of suspense and know how to craft a set, so the Australians’ arrival on stage at a packed O2 Academy is subtle.

Easing gently into the sun-dappled melodies of It’s Not Meant To Be — with its echoes of Revolver-era Beatles — Parker prowls around in near darkness, the only illumination coming from the concentric circles of green light projected across his face and onto a swirling backdrop.

It’s a dreamy start, which continues with a racier Apocalypse Dreams from latest album Lonerism. But any thoughts of a night of quite introspection are soon shattered by a pulsing wall of phased guitars and distorted vocals on the kaleidoscopic Be Above It. All of a sudden we have left the launch pad and are heading into deep space, Cape Canaveral disappearing far behind us.

The stage is lit up with pink and red and we are thrust headlong into the cosmos with an extended jam of Endors Toi – a hypnotic slab of climactic space rock which Hawkwind would have been proud of. The title, I am led to believe, translates as ‘fall asleep’, though there’s little danger of that. It is followed by more psychedelic jamming in the shape of Solitude is Bliss.

Parker tells us he has a cold but there’s no sign he is anything but bang on top of his game, picking up the pace with the laid-back, deliciously trippy West Coast noodling of Mind Mischief.

Oxford Mail:

Cheers of recognition greet their plodding anthem Elephant, its ear-worm rhythm lodging itself in the battered cerebral cortex of this listener’s brain for a good week.

It is followed by the hallucinogenically grungy Oscilly and the driving drone-pop of Desire B.

They encore with the understated folk-prog of Feels Like We Only Go Backwards, ending on the mind-expanding (and that’s just the title), phased and distortion-rich Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control.

Parker looks genuinely delighted, admitting that he thought the show was going to fall flat. Given the strength of feeling on the front row alone, that was never going to happen.

Dig too deeply and it can seem a little derivative (Brian Jonestown Massacre and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club fans would have a field day). At others there are hints that our Kev may have spent too long in his bedroom with his speciality tobaccos. But that is churlish, because it’s startling stuff which makes the prevailing tide of straight-up-and-down indie-rock sound boring.

Punchy, crunchy an consciousness-expanding, there’s nothing tame about this Impala. It kicks like a mule.