Saturday Night Live music: Tame Impala performs ‘Patience’

Entering tonight’s new episode of Saturday Night Live, admittedly we didn’t know much about Tame Impala’s music. That’s no slight to the group whatsoever — we’re just not always particularly aware of the latest trends in music. Yet, we knew that there was a lot of buzz going into tonight’s episode from the outside looking in and because of that, we were ready to see what they brought to the grand studio 8H stage.

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Impala’s first performance on the show tonight was “Patience,” a new song — as a matter of fact, the first new one in years. That was a big part of the appeal behind getting them on the show in the first place. Typically, SNL does whatever it can to book musical guests when they have something to promote and something different to bring to the stage.

We think that Impala’s performance certainly worked — think in terms of a driving melody with a cool, psychedelic flair to it from start to finish. It was as interesting to watch as it was to listen to, and that goes along way to make sure it stands out in a sea of similar performances we’ve seen over the years. We like performers who do tend to go that extra mile, and put that additional degree of thought into everything from the staging to the lighting to (of course) the music that they sing. The reaction on the internet has been mixed, not that we’re shocked by that at all.

As for the second song…

We’d consider this to be an echo of the first one — weird in terms of its vocal echoes but cool in terms of its vibe and instrumentation. There’s an element of folk to what Tame Impala does, but they mask it underneath tie-dye palettes while the musicians play on with their synthesizers and drum sets.

If there’s an easy criticism you can offer, it’s that the staging of the second performance was almost TOO still. Despite the SNL stage being somewhat small, it still felt sparsely populated with so many musicians forced to sit in largely one place while they continued to play on. This song also ran on a little bit long, and we don’t think that the melody this time around was anywhere near as hook-worthy as the first one. It didn’t personally hold our interest to the same degree, though we do like that the group is somehow trying to combine the late 1960’s within the music popular fifty years later.

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What did you think about Tame Impala’s overall performance on this week’s Saturday Night Live? Be sure to share right now in the comments. (Photo: NBC.)