First Listen: MGMT - ‘MGMT’
Hello! I’m here to tell you about the new album from MGMT. You may remember them from such hits as ‘Kids’, ‘Time To Pretend’, ‘Electric Feel’ and other songs that didn’t appear on their second album.
Which, let’s face it, is both completely accurate and a harsh assessment of the Brooklyn band’s career to date, which took a turn for the weird - relatively speaking, anyway - on their much-misunderstood second album, ‘Congratulations’.
That was a rough couple of years for a band that became a pop concern almost by mistake, but now they’re back and feeling positive about a third album which they say splits the difference between the two.
To celebrate their return, we thought we’d give you a quick run-down on what the new album sounds like, with some hopefully illuminating quotes from Andrew VanWyngaarden and Ben Goldwasser along the way.
‘Alien Days’
You’ve heard this one before, most likely - it’s the one that sounds like the world’s saddest funfair rolling into town, or, if you need something a bit more concrete, Syd Barrett and Wayne Coyne having a well-produced baby together. The track (which was released for Record Store Day back in April) lollops along in pleasant enough fashion, without ever really grabbing you by the lapels and demanding your undivided attention. The words, says Andrew, offer “lyrical reflections on some of the feelings we had with the first and second album from the perspective of being 30 and looking back at this crazy time.”
‘Cool Song 2’
I wonder what happened to ‘Cool Song 1’? Because I can’t seem to locate it anywhere on here. Maybe it’s so unbelievably cool you can’t actually find it, in much the same way that REALLY COOL BARS in east London look like laundrettes or barber shops from the outside, just to deter passing ‘lamestreamers’? Anyway, this one quickly settles into a groove that’s all thunk-thunking bongos and pianos like a hungover slap to the face. Andrew’s vocals are very acid-casualty psych, too, in that ‘oh deary me, my brain appears to have fallen to pieces and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put it together again’ kind of fashion that seemed to afflict posh young men of the late 1960s. Again, this is more jam than song per se, but it’s an oddly compelling jam, all the same. A nice Bonne Maman, perhaps.
‘Mystery Disease’
A deliciously dark number - it was inspired, in part, by a friend of the band’s who fell seriously ill with an unknown ailment - that riffs playfully on the big-beat drum loop off ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, with Andrew’s weirdly processed vocal making him sound like the world’s sexiest Dr Who villain. After this guy, maybe. It also sounds a bit like Robert Wyatt crooning over something off The Flaming Lips’ ‘Embryonic’. We’ve mentioned The Flaming Lips twice now, so let’s ask Ben what he thinks of their career full-circle from cult heroes to sort-of pop-stars and back again? Is that something MGMT can hope to emulate? “I think it’s great they’ve managed to survive all these different phases of the music business and come out on top of it able to do whatever they want,” he says. “And compared to a lot of bands who were around at the same time as them in the 90s, as soon as they did something that the labels didn’t deem commercial enough, they just vanished.”
‘Introspection’
Apparently, this cover of a track by cult psychedelic songsmith Faide Jane was cut at producer Dave Fridmann’s suggestion during a lull patch in recording sessions. It’s a fun, mildly hokey tune given a punched-up arrangement by Ben and Andrew - the reverbed guitars on the chorus and chorus of recorders are especially nice touches here. SEMI-INTERESTING FACT: Andrew tells us the lines about “striving for perfection and then hiding when it comes” struck him as mirroring the band’s slightly fraught, obsessive approach to recording ‘Congratulations’: “One of the main things we talked about when we started writing early last year was that we wanted to not filter ourselves and cut off ideas before they get chance to develop, which is what we’ve done a lot in the past, especially on the second record. We were so detail-minded in terms of the arrangements and mixes and tapes, it can suck a bit of the life out of it. And this time, because a lot of the songs would come from improvisations that we’d built on, we wouldn’t go back and tweak the sounds, we’d keep them as they were.”
‘Your Life Is A Lie’
Weirdly, this might be as close as the band has come to writing a straight-up pop song since their early days, but it comes off more of a caricature than anything, the comically repetitive structure meant to mirror the lyrics’ denunciation of ‘straight’ society’s unquestioning reliance on routine. Occasionally, you might be forgiven for wondering if some of the lines here aren’t meant as a rebuttal to fair-weather fans who ditched them after the first album (“Count your friends on your hands / Now look again, they’re not your friends”) - but Andrew feels that would be missing the point: “It’s not supposed to be directed at our fans,” he says. “It’s more for people to use and direct towards whoever they want, whoever they feel like is holding them down”.
Click to view‘A Good Sadness’
This feels much more satisfying after the last track’s pointed silliness; a gorgeously layered electronic jam that reflects (maybe) the band’s burgeoning interest in ambient house producers like The Orb. I know this is probably not the sort of stuff a lot of people want to hear from MGMT, but if they’re to make good on their pledge to follow their own weird impulses and not pander to ‘what’s hot on the hit parade’, this is the sort of full-blooded commitment they’ll need to make. “That whole song is really just a section of a jam that we mixed and maybe added a few parts to,” Andrew notes approvingly of the track.
‘Astro-Mancy’
We’re deep into experimental territory now, Andrew and Ben inhabiting an unlikely middle ground between Aphex-like weird techno and psychedelia; vocals seemingly zapping back and forth between alternate dimensions at will. It’s kinda cool, actually - and makes us think, quite pretentiously, of bits of satellite debris crashing silently into each other in the earth’s orbit. That’s right, I’m quite the poet on the side.
‘I Love You To Death’
Those recorders make a slight return at the beginning of this track - they sound like they’re being played by a small herd of Ralph Wiggums - as Andrew’s vocal begins to take shape amid semi-whispered musings about how “all beginnings are an end / in the blackness, there’s a light”. Which fits in with Andrew’s assertion that the new album sees the band getting all zen on our asses after the self-defeating paranoia of ‘Congratulations’. The track, too, seems as if it’s floating off into the light, acoustic guitars and heavenly choirs bleeding into each other in the aural equivalent of overexposed film. Not sure if there’s a tune here, to be honest, but it feels quite nice.
‘Plenty More Girls In The Sea’
This is an almost Kinks-ish slice of whimsical pop, with the busy-yet-somehow-spacious production that pervades throughout this record dominating Andrew’s vocal. We did manage to discern this much, though, which just confused us even more, to be honest: “There’s plenty of girls in the sea / and plenty of those are not women.”
‘An Orphan Of Fortune’
Underscoring a slight problem that niggles with ‘MGMT’, this closing track finds Andrew’s vocal coming over a little timid and inexpressive. Perhaps it’s something to do with many of the songs’ origins in lengthy jam sessions, but the vocals too often feel like an afterthought to the abundance of studio jiggery-pokery. Still, there’s charm to this song’s mix of ambient noise and languid, Pink Floydian sprawl.
source