Tame Impala – Hammersmith Apollo, London 25/06/13

Sunshine pop purveyor Melody’s Echo Chamber is out in support of Tame Impala tonight, and it’s a match made in heaven in more ways than one. Her lithe French melodies and warm fuzzy textures provide the perfect soundtrack for shaking off the weekday’s drudgery and settling in for a night of dreamy, hypno-grooves. Plus, Melody’s the girlfriend of Tame Impala’s main-man Kevin Parker, who produced her stunning self-titled 2012 debut, and as both bands are playing Glastonbury this weekend, it makes total sense they’d play together as a sort of warm-up, if you will.

It’s no secret Melody’s Echo Chamber released one of the finest dream pop albums of last year, and as such the art-deco theatre is mostly full by the time her band hit the stage. As anyone who’s seen the five-piece outfit live will attest: as seductive as the debut is, in a live setting the band really know how to rock out and their live sound easily surpasses the aural pleasure of the record. And that’s really saying something.

Tame Impala breeze on-stage, instantly inciting the heaving crowd with the floating grooves of ‘Solitude Is Bliss’ from their 2010 debut Innerspeaker. Like many of the songs tonight, it loosely resembles the recorded cut but is fleshed out into expansive spaced-out jams. The band, it quickly becomes obvious, has mastered the art of anticipation; they steadily build a jam, then bring it to a close… and just as you think the song is over, burst back into it, more face-melting than before.

As at their Brixton Academy gig just nine months ago, the visual backdrop is a stream of hallucinatory shapes that seem to be linked to Parker’s guitar – speeding up and changing form with his strumming.

The set effortlessly balances songs from across both Innerspeaker and Lonerism, and the biggest crowd-pleases included the mind-bending ‘Apocalypse Dreams’, the stomping ‘Elephant’, the melancholy-drenched ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’ and the dizzying ‘Why Won’t You Make Up Your Mind?’

Playing massive sold-out shows, the biggest festivals in the world and named best album of the year by music mags across the world, including NME (the first Aussie band to do so in almost 40 years), Tame Impala have reached the dizzying heights that most bands can only dream of. But with Parker only in his mid-twenties, we have to wonder, is this just the beginning?