MGMT frontman Andrew VanWyngarden sings, “You always leave me wanting more” during “I Love You Too, Death,” ironically the best song on this disappointing album.
Somewhere, buried underneath MGMT’s thick exterior of inscrutable noise is a brilliant pop record waiting to see the light of day. Alas, MGMT’s third, self-titled record is a mess. It’s a fascinating mess nonetheless, mostly for the way it redefines the phrase “sensory overload.”
Chances are you’ve never been bombarded by sound in this way. This suggests MGMT was written following chief songwriter Andrew VanWyngarden’s participation in a government-sanctioned science experiment studying the effect that copious amounts of psychedelic drugs have on art.
2010’s criminally underrated Congratulations may have been a similarly acid-guzzling exercise in weirdness. Yet it was also beautiful and evocative, the abstract synthesizer scuzz used more as a seasoning tool than as a three-course meal. On MGMT, all the noise is thrust to the front of the mix, forcing melody to take a secondary role.
If Congratulations was a meticulous pastiche of the late ’60s that was initially liked by very few people, then MGMT, with its odes to Animal Collective and Black Dice, will be liked by virtually no one.
All discussions of the record’s unapproachability must begin on “Your Life Is A Lie,” with its dorky cowbell and glassy-eyed nursery rhymes like “Count your friends/ On your hand/ Now look again/ They’re not your friends.” It’s a song so awful it’s hilarious, and knowing the band’s penchant for practical jokes — on display when it closed its Art Attack XXX set in May with the 12-minute “Siberian Breaks” rather than “Kids” — this is probably intentional.
MGMT does feature a few pure moments that poke through the nearly impenetrable noise. The warm guitar outro on “Astro-Mancy” is gorgeous, even though it lasts for maybe 30 seconds, and the glam rock stomp on “Alien Days” is prime, Congratulations-era MGMT.
Standout track “I Love You Too, Death” skates and shimmies underneath a mile-high pile of synth garbles, but still, inexplicably, emerges as something sublime and immersive. “You always leave me wanting more,” VanWyngarden sings. The same can be said about the album, which is light on memorable moments of palpable beauty.
We know MGMT can write a damn fine pop song. Yet when shoved into the avant-garde meat grinder, the resulting mush is difficult to stomach. Two more albums like this down the road and the band may be adapting one of its own songs into a self-depreciating career recap: “Count your fans/ On your hand/ Now look again/ They’re not your fans.”
