[Outside Lands 2012] Our Most Aniticipated Artist of the Festival
Today marks the beginning of this year's Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco, the fifth edition of the cultural highlight. SKOA will be attending the festival this year, and each day leading up to the festival we will be dishing out a feature focused on the bands set to appear at Outside Lands. Today, the final day of our preview coverage, we look to answer one important question: who is our most anticipated artist of the festival?
With such an incredible and diverse lineup, Outside Lands offers something for everyone. Stevie Wonder, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Metallica, Foo Fighers, Sigur Rós, Jack White, Beck, The Kills, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, Passion Pit, Santigold, MSTRKRFT, The Walkmen, YACHT, Andrew Bird, you name it, there is a band for each and every attendee to get excited about. For us, though, there is one band that sticks out at the forefront, and that is Australian psych rock outfit Tame Impala.
Ever since Tame Impala dropped their debut LP Innerspeaker back in 2010, the psychedelic stylings of the Perth band have never left my eardrums for more than a few days. Somehow, they have perfectly captured what was so good about psychedelic rock in the '60s and '70s, the carefree attitude and the general sense that all that needs to be done is to play the hell out of some fucking instruments and put on a damn good show. When listening to Tame Impala, it's not uncommon to feel as if you're listening to Eric Clapton, transporting you to a time when the biggest names in rock were at their peak. This new wave of neo-psychedelia has been rising since the early to mid-1990s, but Tame Impala directly utilizes the styles and sounds of the 1960s, and they pull it off so well.
For every band that is performing at Outside Lands, the collective love we have for Tame Impala trumps even the biggest names. Hearing their brand of psychedelic rock in a live setting sounds infinitely more tempting than any of the other offerings at the festival. Call me crazy, but the idea of dancing under the influence of who knows how many narcotics to the addicting psychedelic soundscapes of Tame Impala seems like an amazing experience to me. In fact, I'm more sane for thinking so.