TAME IMPALA / Amsterdam, August 2022
Everytime I go see Tame Impala, it feels like I only go backwards, but in a sentimental way. While I'm standing in a young crowd that has come even before us (at 4pm when the doors open at 6.30pm), I reminisce about how it all started - when I was 18 my first love was into this sick Aussie band, so there I was listening to them just to impress a guy with whom I didn't even last 6 months in a relationship. While in most occasions this would lead me to forget about the band, Tame Impala stayed in my life thus becoming more than just a band. As much as I was learning about myself while listening to Lonerism on repeat, I learned about Kevin Parker and how lonely he would feel at the parties or how his relationship eventually came to an end. I look around only to realize that it's been 10 years now. At the same time I feel as if the passing of time doesn't mean anything - I see myself and Tame Impala just as I remember 6 years ago. But why does it feel as if the crowd is getting constantly younger while we are growing older? Or am I not that old after all?
As if my prayers have been heard, my eyes notice few girls dressed in lab coats that I saw from Tame Impala's Rushium cocktail launch. I run up to ask what's going on, and one of them says "Take this the moment the gig starts and you will experience the time like never before." I safely put it in my pocket and do as I was told. Once the doors open, I am 22 again running to secure myself and my mates the spot in front. Maybe even Kevin will notice my Fuck Trevor shirt? But until that happens, I need to get through the support.
The only time when you should trust a stranger (wearing a white lab coat) offering you a pill.
The support of Perfume Genius offers an exploration of music that does not necessarily follow easy-to-digest form of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. Neither does Mike Hadreas find it necessary to use words in order to tell a story. As I stand next to a girl occasionally checking time displayed on The Weeknd's Starboy wallpaper, I get the memo that she isn't entertained. The day before I wondered how Perfume Genius will "warm up" the audience with sounds and forms that shatter musical conventions. Intrigued if it will work, I am pleasantly caught by the unexpectedness of what follows as well as Hadreas' Bowie-esque gender-bending body flow. While some songs (e.g. "Slip Away") remind me of Florence+the Machine, others activate my carnal channels. While The Weeknd bluntly sings about fucking, Perfume Genius implies about sensual lovemaking that arises from your inner senses rather than an object of desire.
Perfume Genius performing “Slip Away”
Once Perfume Genius is done with pausing butterflies from fluttering in my body, the swarm of nervousness - the one that you feel the first months of being in love - ambushes me right to my toes. Soon a doctor appears on the screen and encourages to take that Rushium pill that I had already been holding in my sweaty palm once the curtains to the backstage got closed. As her face is getting blurrier with each syllable breaking into the slow rush of time, five Australian men walk up on stage right in front of my tearing eyes. The doctor's voice gradually turns into a familiar distorted reverberation that perfectly meets with the start of Rushium's effects, and then it hits me: I am back home.
While the tour celebrates The Slow Rush with emphasis on time and the power to manipulate it with the use of the hypothetical drug Rushium, Tame Impala warps present time by passionately going back to 2015 when Currents hit the world. Objectively speaking "The Less I Know The Better" continues to attract young adults at any given time 7 years after its release - over 1 billion listeners on Spotify (probably hundred of them coming from my friends who mistakingly think that this must be my favorite song). That is loudly proven by the audience singing along from top to bottom. While this one will ceaselessly stay in the setlist, Tame Impala resurrects songs like "Nangs" (in the video) and "Disciples" which back in 2016 tour for Currents were bypassed.
Processing the concert with Rushium refusing to leave my body, I feel the urge to close my eyes and get back on the wave that engulfed me during "Apocalypse Dreams" with the immortal drum beat hitting home while harmonizing with my agitated heart. What follows after "Breathe Deeper" (in the video) must be experienced in its full bliss - electrifying blitz of lasers in a color palette of Lonerism and dancing under confetti rain in a mass of bodies that have melted into a caressing wave. While you are there riding the current, Tame Impala are gleaming under the ring of spinning time backed up by their alter egos on the looping screen. If you do believe in Rushium - no matter how hypothetical it is - you will experience time in slow rush.
Tame Impala performing “Breathe Deeper”
