With greater freedom and the second guessing down to just themselves, MGMT have the scope to experiment without caring whose dollar it’s on.
It feels really weird to be talking about MGMT as some kind of non-force in music given that their previous album – 2018’s Little Dark Age – landed in many end-of-year charts, and the title-track (thanks in no small part to blowing up on TikTok) has now racked up mind boggling streaming numbers.
Yet for a number of reasons Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser’s fifth MGMT album feels like the first chapter of a different story.
First off, the duo have parted company with the major label which released all their work up to it, from their debut Oracular Spectacular, hooking up instead with the independent Mom + Pop, a making good of an ‘indie’ status many neutrals had long assumed was already true.
Little Dark Age had marked a retrenchment from a period in which, seemingly baffled by their initial success, the closet bohemians had set out deliberately to alienate casual fans, a feat they made good on through their difficult second and third albums; Congratulations and MGMT respectively.
The time since Little Dark Age saw Goldwasser collaborating with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O on a soundtrack for the animated film Where Is Anne Frank, whilst pandemics and lockdowns also added space to a creative process which was never straightforward.
Now, with greater freedom and the second guessing down to just themselves, the liberated pair have the scope to experiment without caring whose dollar it’s on.
Exhibit one is Mother Nature, a guitar anthem which opens on a classic Britpop strum and with a degree of consciousness, sounds not unlike Oasis, from the key and tempo changes even down to the pounding, reverb drenched outro. MGMT fronting like they come from M12? You’d never have guessed it in a million years, yet here we are.
Before you measure them up for a parka hold on though. The preceding track, opener Loss Of Life (Part 2), mentions the end of the world and the bottom of the sea in amongst a stream of spoken word philosophising and a cheap synth riff, the kind of weird, non-pop, crowd displeasing material which their mischievous instincts once told them they were cool.
So what is it then, the darkness or the sunshiiine? The answer conveniently is for the most part somewhere in between. By and large any immediacy is traded in for enveloping dreamscapes, as conjured up on the likes of I Wish I Was Joking and Nothing Changes, whilst Nothing To Declare instead presents a folky bridge over some untroubled water.
Occasionally though there is some rousing of themselves to purpose. Here the grungy obtuseness of Bubblegum Dog sees them nose through shades of both the sublime and the ridiculous, whilst the epic Nothing Changes – prophetic opening line, ‘This is what the gods must’ve been talking about/When they told me nothing changes’ – crawls towards a climax as proggy as it is pretentious.
Navigating this can be a confusing experience. The shrug emoji feeling is made even more acute by the presence of Dancing In Babylon, a song which apparently, once Christine And The Queens was brought into the fold, was transformed from mawkish roots into a brilliantly over the top 80’s power ballad, the result orthodoxy as a masterclass.
The question is obviously not who MGMT are then, but who are MGMT now? If Loss Of Life is a measure, they are purveyors of art over execution and hosts to concepts and ideas given maximum space to evolve.
The problem is when these don’t work there’s an inescapable sense of being experimented on, and here they just don’t work enough.
