Rockin' Our Turntable: MGMT

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 14, 2010 7:30PM

MGMT’s entire career is built upon two songs they wrote more than five years ago when they were still a duo going to college. Since then the band has played countless live shows and reconfigured itself from a hipster dance act into something you’d be more at home listening to while soaking in a hot tub full of LSD in the middle of the forest.

So it’s no surprise that on Congratulations MGMT finds itself mired in a psychedelia completely foreign to their radio fans, but somewhat familiar to anyone that’s caught them live in the past two years or so. To be fair, the band does take such a hard turn into new territory that the first time we heard Congratulations we weren’t absolutely certain it was MGMT. Instead we wondered if some group paying faithful homage to the ‘60s had somehow gotten mixed in with MGMT’s tapes at the mastering facility.

Congratulations’ greatest weakness is that it seems to stand as little more than a tribute album to an era of music that has already been thoroughly mined, reconstructed and recontextualized. What we end up with here is an album of flower power pop riding the edge of darkness and while it’s a thoroughly enjoyable listen there is no singular rush to be found within the disc’s nine songs. And maybe that’s the point. By eschewing their dance pop tendencies and honing the psych pop, MGMT has crafted a work that is best listened to all the way through and actually has the hallmarks of an album created by a band interested in finding their voice.

MGMT plays The Riv on June 18