Outside Lands 2021’s Sunday lineup on the Lands End stage could only have been more Australian if it had featured Olivia Newton-John playing the didgeridoo for Kylie Minogue… while Hugh Jackman stood there eating a Vegemite sandwich.
Not only were the final acts of the weekend — Rüfüs du Sol and Tame Impala — the two pre-eminent bands from making waves on the festival circuit over the past seven years, but Tame Impala channeled Aussie children’s band The Wiggles at the top of the set and then again during their most propulsive song, “Elephant.” (While pretty obscure to American audiences, The Wiggles are as recognizable to Australians under 40 as Sesame Street is here.)
Sunday night’s final slot at Outside Lands has traditionally been reserved for heritage acts like Elton John, Tom Petty, Paul McCartney, or Paul Simon. While booking a trio of more youthful white dudes barely budges the demographic needle, it’s nice to shake things up just a little. (A couple of years ago, The Who were given that spot with Solange at the Sutro Stage, and if you skipped the more talented Knowles sister worrying that this was possibly your only remaining chance to see The Who live, you quickly realized you lost out on something special only to watch Roger Daltrey sing the line “Hope I die before I get old” without a trace of self-awareness. Don’t get fooled again.)
Tame Impala, the project of the sonically expansive Kevin Parker, is starting to take on some of the trappings of arena-rock bloat, namely “Rushium,” the fake pharmaceutical that claims to dilate space-time for its users, like some combination of cannabis, ketamine, and The Spice from Dune.
Do you know what can be fun? Recreational drug use at festivals with the crew you love most. Do you know what’s almost never funny? Clumsily obvious references to recreational drug use.
But even then, it was such fucking good set. Lasers beat pyrotechnics every time, and from “Enders Toi” to “Breathe Deeper” to the maximally psychedelic “Let It Happen” show what happens when a band with extraordinary production values fills itself out with extra personnel for a live show. “Elephant” in particular felt richer and deeper — as if Rushium were what the bandmates ingest before they go on.
If Parker sings eerily like John Lennon, then the surprisingly tender “Yes, I’m Changing” could be an out-take from Double Fantasy, particularly the crowd-pleasing line: “They say people never change / But that’s bullshit.”
Tame Impala never seems artsy-fussy like Radiohead, who endure frequent equipment malfunctions because Thom Yorke & co. insist on bringing their own gear. Festival culture means crowd-pleasing is the paramount concern.
Would you want to bore 20,000 people into turning around and walking away from you? Shut up and play the hits, or, barring that, some weirdly transfixing moods beamed in from some pulsating quasar visible only in the Southern Hemisphere.
A mass exit befell The Strokes on Friday, but otherwise, the weekend held together. The longtime house (and techno) veteran and stealth afro-futurist Green Velvet, subbing in for Scarypoolparty on the Panhandle stage, brought mid-afternoon to a boil with his earworm-y collaborations with Claude Von Stroke and Shiba San. (His icily trippy “La La Land,” now 20 years old, is the rare song that references drug use well.)
That Green Velvet’s 4:30 set coincided with the grounds filling up with costumed people — Guy Fieri, Cruella De Vil, Mario and Luigi, and enough astronauts to staff a luxury interstellar ark — on what was by far the most crowded day of the weekend was nothing short of an atmosphere-heightener of its own.
Rüfüs du Sol, who are as good at 3 p.m. as they are at 3 a.m., bridge the Pacific Ocean better than anyone. You can hear California seeping into them the more time they spend here. Mixing up songs from their latest album, Surrender, with classics from Bloom and Solace, like “You Were Right” and “Like an Animal” — and the nine-minute odyssey “Innerbloom,” essentially un-releasable as a single but remixed again and again because its peaks and valleys are so utterly lovely.
The somewhat nervous-sounding, 17-year-old nonbinary Kansan Evann McIntosh seemed to be nursing a sore throat — a mug of tea sat next to them on a stool throughout — but gradually recovered their confidence, but confidence is one thing that Nelly is not lacking.
Quiet for most of the last decade, he nonetheless supercharged Lands End with the same brio you might expect circa 2002, when “Hot in Herre” began its multi-year reign of ubiquity. Hot off their sexy remix of Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman,” the impeccably gorgeous and stylishly athletic duo SOFI TUKKER channeled their global hipster vibes — Are they German? Are they Brazilian? Do they live in Florida, or NYC? — into an early evening romp bracketed by Aussies.
J Balvin, who took to the Twin Peaks stage at the same time as Tame Impala, was also fire — becoming the first Latin act to have a headlining performance at OSL.
Ultimately it got so packed that dividing your time became next to impossible. It was as if the 45-minute waits for the SOMA Tent had metastasized, festival-wide. But in a way, partying-in-place takes the anxious edge off. And you had to be thankful that this Sunday wasn’t last Sunday when the atmospheric river dumped six inches of rain on Golden Gate Park. (Nobody wants to read entitled tweets @-ing the organizers asking for a refund.)
In all likelihood, Outside Lands 2022 will resume its second-weekend-of-August spot, with its later sunsets and knighted Sunday night headliners and wind-driven fog that can penetrate even the thickest light-up faux fur. So how beautiful to have this return be a probable one-off, and we get to do it all again in less than 10 months.
As Tame Impala sang on their encore, “Don’t make me wait forever.”
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