Tame Impala Brings New Tunes and Far-Out Visuals to Their Ryman Debut

In three short years, Tame Impala has gone from blogosphere buzz band to theater-packing current indie kings, and the psych-poppy Australian outfit knows how to tease out their cache of cool just so. They’ve released four of the 13 tracks from this year’s forthcoming Currents over the past several weeks, playing them live in the run-up to the album’s July release as they crisscross North America on their particularly successful current tour.

Monday night at the Ryman — with their power-rock forefathers The Who playing just a block away at Bridgestone Arena — Tame Impala made their Nashville debut with a 90-minute set played to a hip-skewing, young and youngish sold-out crowd. It was an audience that counted in its ranks local musicians including the hardcore-punk high-schoolers from Jawws, indie-pop singer Jessie Baylin, at least one dude from psych-rock crew Penicillin Baby and one-half of The Raconteurs.

“This has gotta be the most different place we’ve ever played,” said Tame leader Kevin Parker mid-set through a shroud of reverb. There was more Mother Church praise — not to mention a couple of “tributes” and a whole lot of spacy jamming — to come.

First things first, venue logistics: The Ryman is currently remodeling, undergoing some substantial construction-related growing pains as they prepare for the opening of their Cafe Lula in June. That means the box office and main entrance are currently set up in the area that has long served as the venue’s outdoor smoking area, while the Fifth Avenue side of the lobby — and the entire exterior of that side of the building — are completely sealed off.

The Spin made it into the auditorium as Mini Mansions — the electro-poppy outfit led by Queens of the Stone Age bassist Michael Shuman — dug into their set. The trio, clad in outlandishly patterned suits, delivered a dark, distorted take on synth pop, with Shuman dexterously playing a stand-up drum kit (rigged with a floor tom in place of a kick drum, plus some percussion pads) at center stage. A slowed-down and dirgy cover of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” if nothing else, was a fun little experiment in what toying with tempo can do to an undeniable pop melody. The set was sleek and often catchy — particularly catchy was power-poppy set-closer “Freakout!” — thanks in part to a trove of cool sounds and tones. The verdict? Mini Mansions: worth checking out further.

Between sets, Tame Impala’s stagehands set up the band’s gear while clad in lab coats (an homage to the ones worn by Abbey Road’s engineers, perhaps?), while a pair of state-of-the-art projectors was calibrated in the balcony. Pretty soon, the perpetually barefoot Parker and his band entered, launching their set with a brief instrumental number while backed by concentric-circle projections and blinding floodlights. After that, it was straight into the new tune “Let It Happen,” which was accompanied by a dazzling sensory overload of lights, projected images and what we could have sworn was the distant aroma of a powerful doobie.

Honestly, all of Tame Impala’s production was very nearly distracting: The massive screen at the back of the stage displayed images that looked alternately like 2001: A Space Odyssey’s light tunnels, swirling Spirograph images, what it might look like to float through the cytoplasm of a cell, and a psychedelic eyeball. At one point, Parker showed off an especially impressive bit of production, wherein the visuals synced to the sounds he produced with his guitar, each note and bend and pick-slide producing a different green, shape-shifting squiggle. The visuals stopped just short of being off-putting, however, thanks partially to the fact that they paired so well with the band’s proggy sonics, and partially due to the fact that Tame Impala spends most of its set concerned with the business of playing well — they aren’t boring to watch, per se, but without moves like, say, Pete Townshend’s windmills or Roger Daltrey’s mic-swings, a little something supplementary doesn’t hurt.

As for the set list, Parker and his four bandmates played mostly tunes from 2012’s excellent breakthrough long-player Lonerism — “Be Above It,” “Apocalypse Dreams,” “Why Won’t They Talk to Me?” and a surprisingly early-in-the-set rendition of their biggest hit, “Elephant,” among them. “Elephant” featured a long-form, jazzy breakdown that the band joked was meant as a tribute to The King — “the worst tribute ever to Elvis Presley,” as they put it, wearing their giggly Aussie joviality ever-so charmingly. Also in the mix were “Alter Ego” and “It’s Not Meant to Be” from 2010’s InnerSpeaker, as well as the Currents song “Eventually.” The encore featured a sing-along to “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” followed by a loose and jammy “Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control.”

Tame Impala’s new material continues down the path the band set out on with Lonerism: It’s playful, experimental, mellow, dreamy, catchy and spaced-out by design, but rarely is any of it as succinct as songs like “Elephant” or most of what was on InnerSpeaker. Nevertheless, delivered in an immersive multimedia package, played by excellent musicians who kept things light and groovy — and displayed the requisite amount of deference for the Mother Church, noting the importance of the building’s history — Tame Impala's first Nashville show left The Spin with nary a thing to complain about.