You’ve probably heard it more times than “Time to Pretend” by now: the story of MGMT vs. Oracular Spectacular. The duo’s 2007 debut stands as one of recent history's rare game-changing (read: replicable) pop-rock records and its success caught everyone off guard, most of all MGMT themselves. Paralyzed by songs they had the misfortune of disliking more than anyone else, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser responded in 2010 with Congratulations, a well-meaning, overstuffed, and reactionary record of big ambitions that were only vaguely defined. It didn’t yield a hit, but Congratulations gave them something more valuable going forward: moral high ground. Of course, to follow them on their new path, you needed to believe that “Time to Pretend”, “Kids” and “Electric Feel” would prove to be MGMT’s “Creep” or “She Don’t Use Jelly”, an unrepresentative, fluke hit that allowed them to become stealth operatives for uncompromising art-rock in the compromised major label system.
The most important part of is this narrative is believing that MGMT are victimized by Oracular’s commercial success, a success they won’t repeat because hardly anyone will. If MGMT achieves only half of Oracular's platinum sales, it'll still be one of the top 30 or so sellers in 2013. But judging from the once again well-meaning, overstuffed, and reactionary MGMT, they’ll never make a truly weirder album than their debut either. Their original, guileless mishmash of gonzo storytelling, imperious pomp-rock, and day-glo synthesizers was the work of people who had no choice but to stay true to their ideals, as they had no pretensions or even any real clue of how it would stick. That spirit gave way to a self-conscious, scare-quotes “weirdness” indicative of artists trying to micromanage what you think about them.
And as with Congratulations, there are just enough moments of cohesion to counteract the latter impulse. Though it’s impossible to know what MGMT’s goals were, “Alien Days” at least feels like the most successful alignment of their supposedly divergent impulses towards prog’s complexity and pop’s pleasure. At first hearing, “Alien Days” feels unnecessarily fussy in both composition and production: you get actual child (not childlike) vocals, distorted drum breaks, and what sounds like the use of all 12 major chords within the span of thirty seconds. But once you get a sense of the labyrinthine structure, every strange turn ends up being the right one, each melodic resolution a small, substantial and lasting surprise, like continually finding a dollar in your jeans.
But the “Mystery Disease” referenced on the third track might just be MGMT's allergic reaction to anything resembling a straightforward pop song.Like most of the non-singles from Oracular, “Introspection” is derived from the ornate pastoralia of Kinks and Bowie and then handed off to producer Dave Fridmann to turn it all pixellated and paisley. But it plays out as a four-and-a-half-minute distraction, with all kinds of “What’s this button do?” knob-twiddling-- windshield-wiper stereo panning, perpetually increasing distortion that drowns out the chorus, tremolo effects. “Mystery Disease” bears a sleek glam melody that gets slathered in nasal flange effects and set to booming breakbeats; here, MGMT all of a sudden reveals themselves a late-90s connection between kinda proggy UK bands like Mansun and Doves, studio geeks whose rare pop songs are similarly their most beloved moments. At least on “Your Life Is a Lie”, the production serves the purpose of the lyrics, as VanWyngarden takes your perceptions through a hall of mirrors before abruptly stopping at two minutes, leaving you more confused than before.
That all happens during the first half of MGMT and in a likely nod to their vinyl-era heroes, Side B becomes a figurative record flip. With the exception of the shuffling goof "Plenty of Girls in the Sea", the band does away with any semblance of verse-chorus structure after its most accessible moment (“Your Life Is a Lie”), letting you know this is the real MGMT. And in fairness, the second half of MGMT shows you what they’ve been all along: a centrist indie rock band on a major label, only now you have to believe those two circles overlap way less than MGMT are letting on. The “weirdness” is just a matter of relativity at best, and at worst, a clever marketing ploy to curry critical favor to hedge against its commercial prospects. If you still think KROQ is seeking to add deep cuts from MGMT to its playlist, then yes, the likes of “Astro-Mancy” will sound awfully bizarre slotting in between bands like Bastille and Imagine Dragons, two examples of acts whose synth-spiked, genre-straddling electro-pop is somehow nominally “indie” thanks to MGMT.
But for all of their talk of going off the deep end, MGMT ultimately takes on a less flattering image, of a band wading in the indie mainstream. Hermetically sealed echo chamber “A Good Sadness” is a wallflower’s idea of space disco and indistinguishable from most anything on the most recent Bear in Heaven album, except MGMT eliminate any sort of consistent rhythmic locomotion. While Youth Lagoon’s Wondrous Bughouse upped the ante for bong-rip phaser effects, Trevor Powers uses them to support and accent luminous and legible mediations on cosmic circumstances; closer “An Orphan of Fortune” wilfully sinks into impenetrable goo. All of this gassy, overproduced stuff should make “Plenty of Girls in the Sea” sound revelatory, but it’s nothing but context, i.e., “see, we could totally write simple pop songs if we wanted to.” But if they think a Bee Gees groove in 6/4 time or an origin story about doing blow and marrying models were simple pop songs rather than some of the strangest hits of the past decade, we're dealing with resentments too deep-rooted to be fixed over the span of two albums.
Still, it’s easy to root for MGMT. Their LateNightTales compilation is fun as hell and their deferential, deflective tone suggests that they envy not only the creative freedom of Radiohead and Flaming Lips, but also their ability to serve as guides towards the eccentric influences who never shared their commercial luck. And when you see their Letterman performance of “Your Life Is a Lie”, it feels like the definitive version, as the multimedia format gives MGMT a better ability to convey the mischief and exuberance that their self-titled so badly needs. Because on MGMT, being weird is serious business, their ideas of prog are regressive, their psychedelia draws into its own dark recesses rather than transporting or illuminating, self-indulgence posing as artistic martyrdom. In other words, it’s not MGMT vs. Oracular Spectacular; if anything’s holding MGMT back, it’s themselves.
