Concert review: Tame Impala, Logan Campbell Centre

Tame Impala's lead singer, Kevin Parker, performing live on stage. Photo / Rhys Machell

In an ideal world, for premium enjoyment you'd see Perth psychedelic rockers Tame Impala in the wild and free surrounds of a crazy outdoor festival like Splore. Their swirling, hypnotising, wall of sound type compositions are perfect for spinning around in a field, and swaying your arms in the dreamy singalong choruses. The band have performed those kind of slots here, at Rhythm and Vines, and Laneway, but for their first headline show in New Zealand, they had to make do with the somewhat staid environment of the Logan Campbell Centre on a Tuesday night.

Tame Impala performing live on stage. Photo / Rhys Machell

However, the band and the crowd did their best to bring that hazy festival experience indoors. The surprisingly young audience demographic danced the floor section into a sweaty, sauna-like mass, and a few brave girlfriends jumped up to sit on shoulders to do their best upper body gyrations, while the band had an impressively mind-bending light and video show, all vibrant hues and endless movement, carefully curated by a VJ wearing a lab coat - perhaps reminiscent of Pink Floyd in their early days.

That crazy kinetic energy coming from the lights and screens was quite the contrast to the band, who all remained pretty well static for the entire concert, and had little interaction with each other or the crowd, except for lead singer/songwriter Kevin Parker, who came out from behind the mic about halfway through and proceeded to add a little trippy rock n roll swagger to proceedings, coming out to the edge of the risers, and grooving into his guitar solos.

He's a compelling front man (the crowd loved his bare feet) so it was great to see him loosen up and lose himself in the tracks the way we imagine he might've in the studio.

Tame Impala performing live on stage. Photo / Rhys Machell

They cut the setlist fairly equally between their two most recent albums, Currents and Lonerism, while also adding select favourites from Innerspeaker, and did an impressive job of creating a sound that was remarkably faithful to the many nuances in dynamics, and weaving the parts of each track together to create a textured wall of sound. The sound quality was possibly the best I've experienced all year, but it was perhaps almost too perfect for the first five or six tracks, which included current hit Let It Happen, and The Moment, but didn't quite achieve lift-off.

However the mid-set explosion of Elephant, Yes I'm Changing, and The Less I Know The Better took energy levels up a notch, and felt like the delirious state one expects from Tame Impala.

Tame Impala performing live on stage. Photo / Rhys Machell

There was some spine-tingling, ear piercing guitar wizardry as an intro to Cause I'm A Man, and a body-shuddering finale in Apocalypse Dreams, before they returned for an encore of Feels Like We Only Go Backwards, which provided one of the singalong highlights of the night. The descriptive Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control rounded off a performance that was high on effort and excellent technicality, but still would've been taken to a whole different level in a seaside field.

Who: Tame Impala
Where: Logan Campbell Centre
When: Tuesday November 24

- nzherald.co.nz