Tame Impala Sends the ’Stone to Space

Fans inside Bridgestone Arena probably haven’t yelled “Kevin!” all that loudly or frequently since former Nashville Predators winger Kevin Fiala was taking cracks at opposing goals on the ice. Wednesday night, though, there were cheers and chants aplenty for a “Kevin.” That would be Kevin Parker, the Australian psych-pop-rocker whose project Tame Impala took center stage at the ’Stone on a busy night in Music City.

Around the same time, just across the street, the legendary Bob Dylan graced the Mother Church with his presence, while contemporary art ensemble chatterbird and roots musician Leyla McCalla were flexing their collective muscle at the National Museum of African American Music. While the other two shows offered lessons in history, Parker & Co. almost certainly had them beat with crowd noise and a light show that dazzled in the extreme.

Parker, an affable thirtysomething who plays most sets like he’s rocking out with friends in his garage, might not represent what first comes to mind when you think of the frontman at an arena show. (Maybe that’s more like Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, who was at Municipal Auditorium a few blocks away.) But for the Tame Impala fans who packed Bridgestone’s floor and lower bowls, Parker’s presence was enough to make a standing ovation at a Preds game sound like polite applause at a golf tournament.

If nothing else, the overwhelming rush of the full experience of Tame Impala on this scale is bound to get folks clamoring for more. Parker’s lush, sway-ready ballads and kinetic, jammy rockers, paired with rainbow blasts of lasers and lights, make you feel like you’ve been zapped into the Grid to jam out with Jeff Bridges at a concert in Tron, or maybe you’ve stared just a bit too long into the eyes of Futurama’s Hypnotoad. There’s nothing left to do but lose yourself in the psychedelic groove and smash-bang bravado of Parker’s biggest, best tunes. Consider this a formal request for the band’s next visit to Nashville to take place over a few nights at Adventure Science Center’s Sudekum Planetarium.

Opening Wednesday’s show was Shayna McHayle, better known by her stage name Junglepussy. McHayle, who you might recognize from her supporting turn in 2018’s indie feature Support the Girls, is a ferocious stage presence. In her set, she mixed earlier stadium-ready rap anthems like “Trader Joe” and “Bling Bling” with more recent efforts like “Critiqua” and “Movie Screen” from her cinematic EP Jp5000.

McHayle isn’t afraid to push boundaries with her feminist spins on raunchy rap bangers — sometimes you gotta work so blue you might make Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion blush. Onstage, she was backed by screens with video that brought the audience into the full Junglepussy experience; sadly our photog missed out. Her brand of intelligent, fearless, experimental hip-hop might not be the first pairing you’d think of for Tame Impala, but it fit well. McHayle owned the stage and got the crowd going early.

Then came the main event. Last year, Parker — who writes and performs all of Tame Impala’s material in the studio and is joined on the road by Jay Watson on bass, Julien Barbagallo on drums, Dominic Simper on guitar and keys and Cam Avery on synths— finally got to tour around Tame Impala's most recent album, 2020’s The Slow Rush. This show came at the very end of a run gearing up for 2022’s festival season, and the set list drew heavily from The Slow Rush with some perennial favorites from previous albums like Currents and Lonerism.

Over the past decade-and-a-half, it seems fans have memorized much of Tame Impala’s catalog, which feels tailor-made for an arena. The shape-shifting and impossible-not-to-sing-along-with “Eventually,” the grooving “Posthumous Forgiveness” and the gnarly and charging Floydian guitar-and-synth freakout “Elephant” blended perfectly with the sensory near-overload of the light show to make the ginormous space feel even grander.

What makes music important and enduring is how it translates what the musicians have experienced or imagined in ways that words can’t do by themselves. Tame Impala had thousands of people gathered in one spot Wednesday and feeling like they were being whisked away to worlds unknown by a UFO or fighting off a horde of replicants — rather than watching a rock concert in a big ol’ industrial-type room that also hosts hockey, wrestling and the occasional monster-truck showcase. What began as Parker’s bedroom project in the late Aughts has graduated to the arena level with flying colors.