MGMT – MGMT
1.Alien Days
2.Cool Song No.2
3.Mystery Disease
4.Introspection
5.Your Life Is A Lie
6.A Good Sadness
7.Astro-Mancy
8.I Love You Too, Death
9.Plenty Of Girls In The Sea
10.An Orphan Of Fortune
After releasing their debut record Oracular Spectacular in the year 2007 the psychedelic indie band MGMT got pretty famous: they signed the major label Columbia Records and the two singles Time To Pretend and Kids managed it into the mainstream radio channels-it seemed like almost every radiolistener knew the lyrics. As a result of this achievement everyone had quite big expectations when the US based band revealed the release of their sophomore album Congratulations in 2010.
Unfortunately it’s fairly hard for musicians to repeat such a success, there for the record has been a disappointment for most of the “old” MGMT fans. The band stuck to their roots but couldn’t gleam with radio hits. The majority of fans postmarked the album with the adjective “boring”. Barely anyone realised (or didn’t want to realise) the difficulty to recap the success of a debut LP-you can only invent a sound once, not twice. Hence Congratulations didn’t get it’s actually deserved appreciations. Three years later the publication of MGMTs self-titled third record is in the daily occurrence and we all wondered what the album would be like: a hit-loaded success like Oracular Spectacular or a for most of the fans dull but actually misunderstood record as Congratulations?
Apparently MGMT is a mixture of both. There are quite uninteresting but in fact elaborated songs like I Love You Too, Death or A Good Sadness and also tracks which carry hit-potential , for example the catchy Your Life Is a Lie or the rather bright Introspection. And it seems like they kept their affection for Kids– the opener begins with a kid’s voice singing, Andrew VanWyngarden applies later on. MGMT have always been quite psychedelic and experimental but the climax is MGMT – at least for now. The record is a blurred journey through weird lyrics ( Your Life Is a Lie, There Are Plenty Of Girls In The Sea) and spacy noises-it would be one psychedelic stream if there weren’t the breaks between the ten tracks (this mainly applies for the second half).
MGMT is a sophisticated record which shows that MGMT still knows how to produce a proper psychedelic indie album. It won’t reach Oracular Spectaculars success but that’s really not necessary. It’s a satisfying work which hopefully will get its merited acknowledgement.