About halfway through Tame Impala’s set at Alexandra Palace, Kevin Parker picks out a member of the audience holding a sign with the name of their song ‘Alter Ego’. Despite the levity of the moment (Parker tells them to show the crowd, and instructs the band, “Dudes, play some celebration music,” which they duly do, breaking into 30 seconds of Beck’s ‘Where It’s At’ almost spontaneously,) it belies a deeper sentiment, one that runs through all of the band’s output and shapes their sonic and lyrical identity. By making the audience provide their own celebration, the Perth psychrockers remove themselves from the equation, retreating into their own world where they can ignore the pressure of reality.
The band’s relentless focus on this singular theme allows the gig to transcend mere live music, becoming an all-enveloping bodily experience. Yet curiously it also limits their ambition as a live band, and the clear experimental powers that they occasionally allow to shine through remain undeveloped.
From the start, this isolation exists as a backdrop for the gig. Alexandra Palace, perched at the top of Muswell Hill with commanding views over London, is hardly the most cosmopolitan of venues. The journey up the hill and the panorama from its summit provides an odd but thrilling sense of detachment. This is somewhat ruined by the irritating faux-festival vibe in the main atrium, complete with astroturf and an accordion player, with more tweed than you could ever wish to see in one room. But the hall itself is entirely as Tame Impala intend it. The lighting and sound are used to fantastic eff ect by the band, pervasive throughout the set and drowning out any sense of the outside.
Isolation comes hand-in-hand with authenticity, and this is perhaps what keeps Tame Impala back. ‘Alter Ego’ is a good example of this, a psychedelic musing on social anxiety whose very title is an exploration of locking oneself away, of projecting an image that isn’t entirely truthful. Tame Impala strive against this throughout, insisting that they hold themselves up to the musical standards expected of them. Save for a minority of songs, there is little deviation from the album recording in their live set. Sometimes this is to a devastatingly powerful effect, as in ‘Elephant’ when the entire crowd sings along to the guitar solo as successfully as they do the lyrics. One can hardly blame the band when they’ve released three albums of such stunning quality, but when they do display the skill they obviously have in improvising, it becomes jarring to see it utilised so little.
The highlight of the show, the crashing ‘Apocalypse Dreams’, is transformed from a slightly obscure Lonerism album track into a nine-minute odyssey that moves through driving snare beats and starry guitar parts to culminate in a drum build that seems to last for decades before exploding back into the ï¬nale. This is where Tame Impala’s skill as performers is truly evident – the audience is captivated by every moment of it, swaying along in solitary rapture, and the full-bodied lighting only emphasises the changes in timbre and tone, as rainbows spilling out of the stage frame the band in their triumphal conclusion.
Moments like this show why Tame Impala deserve their fearsome reputation, and while this sort of extension on every song would be foolish, it throws the rest of the band’s set into sharp relief. The change in emphasis between 2012’s Lonerism and 2015’s Currents, from their bluesy roots to a more clinical synth-pop, plays out on stage. This internal battle of competing influences again shows how in Parker’s struggle for authenticity, he has to balance the demands of performance with those of his own self-belief.
As he sings so pointedly on set ender ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’, “maybe fake’s what I like”. If there is one thing to take away from this gig, it is that Parker truly doesn’t, and it manifests itself in a triumphant, if unwarrantedly reserved set.
