You're Listening Wrong (or Why the New MGMT Record Fucking Rocks)

Fuck the Haters

About three years ago, I heard "Flash Delirium," MGMT's follow-up single to their relative-to-other-post-file-sharing-era-records smash debut Oracular Spectacular and thought "Is this a joke?" Then I saw the cover to the full record and though, yeah, this is definitely a joke. A brief listen through proved what everyone suspected, that MGMT froze up at the expectations weighing them down and rather than attempt to create another "Time to Pretend," they had fallen off the deep end, never to be heard from again.

Two years later, on the cusp of a psychedelic revival from Tame Impala, Foxygen, and other Pitchfork-approved niche saviors of the dead rock genre, I picked up Congratulations and realized I had been stuck in 2010 when I listened to it while MGMT was leading the way towards Obama Term 2. "Flash Delirium" now stands as one of the great singles of the new decade, and the album as a whole seems decidedly less goofy than it did on first release and more impressively indebted to the sprawling art rock of the late 60s and early 70s with a firm grasp of modern studio technique that yanks the record out of the retro bin. It sounds every bit as fresh today as it sounded overwrought then.

Unfortunately, even if many of the trends that MGMT predicted in 2010 have come to fruition, many people still seem to have missed two key lessons:

1) MGMT does not need to be psychoanalyzed
2) This is the band they were all along

What ended up happening the first time around was a general critical consensus around the idea that MGMT had been so desperate to either make a grand statement (good old Pitchfork even capitalized Creating Art in their otherwise fair enough dismissal of the record) or reject their previous success that they froze up and produced a work that was too messy to be enjoyable (there were a few champions of the record). People simply couldn't forget Oracular's core singles while listening to the follow-up. Still, nearly ten years after those singles were made, and after the narrowing of the band's audience in the wake of Congratulations, people remain fixated on the band they first came to know, like Radiohead fans wishing for "Creep" in the wake of OK Computer. MGMT is no Radiohead, given, but psychedelic electro rock of the most spectacular kind would never reach the 2013 audience that Radiohead's soaring alt-rock statement did in 1997, so as one audience has drifted away the people who are left to savor the beautiful cover of Faine Jade's "Introspection" running into the subversive first single "Your Life Is A Lie" are few and far between.

That's a real shame, because MGMT might turn out to be my favorite rock record of the year. Building on the psyche-prog influences of their last record, this self-titled statement feels much tighter and more directed than its predecessor. As impressive as Congratulations could be, a full listen could feel exhausting - there's just so much packed into its running time that listening in two or three song segments felt appropriate (the record often felt like it was in movements, anyway). The new record is much tighter, incredibly tight, I would say, even if the vinyl presentation feels appropriate because each side has its own personality (if you can find a vinyl rip, by the way, I highly recommend it, as the CD is brickwalled to shit). The first half begins with the brilliant "Alien Days" before segueing into psych-prog epics that balance a tongue-in-cheek tone with a straight-faced execution. Post-"Your Life Is a Lie," though, the album takes on a decidedly kraut-rock air, balancing their pop sensibilities with driving rhythms and purposefully muddy production. It's both dirtier and less experimental than Animal Collective's last two records, but where Centipede Hz started to feel repetitive, Congratulations maintains its energy level as well as Merriweather Post Pavillion. Like that record, there are only a handful of truly straightforward pop songs, but every track is brimming with ideas and unexpected twists. It feels modern, even as it wears its decades-old influences on its sleeve.

From a commercial perspective, these choices seem to have doomed MGMT to general rejection. I seriously doubt "Alien Days" or even "Plenty of Girls in the Sea," the two pop masterpieces that (nearly) bookend the record, will get any notable play on the radio, and most people continue to come to MGMT expecting pop sugar instead of art meat, dooming this record to the same fate Congratulations unjustly suffered. But who listens to the radio anymore, anyway? And people who are looking for their next hooky four minutes can take Foster the People or Fun. if they are so inclined. Congratulations and MGMT are mission statements, meant to allow the band to produce the music they want to produce, yes, but intended to draw out not the right fan or the true fan but a certain kind of fan, the kind who wants to hear whatever it is MGMT makes next. These are the people who show up to concerts (where bands make money) and follow you down the rabbit hole towards the increasingly sub-divided world of rock in the 2000s. That's when they start to seem much more savvy, and their career plan starts to look just as forward-looking as their music.

The truth is of course that there's nothing wrong with dismissing another MGMT record. But if you're coming at it expecting something and responding to it in those terms, regardless of what you find, you aren't really listening to music, just like I wasn't in 2010 when I streamed "Flash Delirium" into my shitty computer speakers sandwiched between the regular flow of whatever else I stumbled upon that day. You're crunching the numbers, and there are plenty of people to do that for you. Listening to MGMT with an open mind is not a guarantee you'll love it - this isn't music for everyone, nor is most good music - but it is a guarantee that you won't miss out on something you could have loved, if you'd only left your expectations behind.