MGMT
Little Dark Age
Never before has a band so heavily sought their own destruction as MGMT. Their hits were inside jokes that went too far, they despised playing shows for disgusting teenagers that only knew three of their songs at most, and they hated...HATED fame.
2010’s Congratulations was a heel-turn of style if ever there was one; a hot mess of lo-fi psych rock that definitely fit Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser’s aesthetic, but it was certainly far from the hippie-synth-pop that millions of tweens screaming at festivals the world over wanted. The album was brilliant—loud, experimental, inventive—and it did exactly what MGMT wanted: no one listened to it.
In case “no one” was too many fans, the duo doubled down on their electro/psych fusion experiment with 2013’s MGMT, and it was...well, insane. So lost in proggish noodling and “I hit this button because it was there” randomness, the album was unfocused, unfinished, and worst of all, uninteresting. When they were done, the album sold roughly three copies, and VanWyngarden and Goldwasser essentially abandoned the project for greener pastures, more than happy to leave the neon-painted-boys-in-druid-capes personas to the winds of time. They took a career built on fun pop that gave them a platinum record and multiple best-of-the-year awards, gave it four middle fingers, and peaced out.
Then it was November 2016. Without rehashing the entire stomach-churning travesty that was the election of our first SSR Commandant, it goes without saying that Donald inspired a lot of...ahem...constructive creativity (see DAMN., Peasant, Masseduction, Brutalism, I literally cannot name them all, etc.). And so we have arrived at—as VanWyngarden so eloquently named our current time—America’s Little Dark Age.
To say LDA is a return to form is to either not understand the concept of form or to willfully forget. Certainly, no one could be blamed for comparing it to Oracular Spectacular, I mean, if we were only looking at whether they both contained pop-formula songwriting. But these songs are not pop; they are post-pop.
Heavily influenced by Ariel Pink, John Maus, and other hypnagogic artists, MGMT learned the seductive and kind-of-silly ways of mock-pop. The songs are catchy, the hooks are tight, the beats are synth as fuck, but the lyrics, and the aesthetics of how they present them, are making fun of you. And me. All of us.
Songs like “When You Die” come right out and say it: “Go fuck yourself / I’m mean, not nice.” Swathed in plinky guitar strings and a wash of sequencer din, many of LDA’s songs find a way to fill every available auditory space while still leaving you feeling...cold, distant. This is the world MGMT wanted to build, and they succeeded brilliantly.
“TSLAMP” (Time Spent Looking At My Phone) is a prescient and sardonic look at the alienating world of cellphone addiction, made especially ironic given that I both looked up the song’s lyrics and wrote this review on my phone. The chorus is a sumptuous fill of voices that gives the listener a warm feeling in the tundra.
“Me & Michael” is an incredibly sweet, if a little confusing, exploration of friendship. Sung to the tune of what was surely a Human League b-side that was never released, VanWyngarden’s voice reaches a power and rock-solid strength that matches that of the eponymous relationship.
“One Thing Left to Try” is MGMT at their most recognizable: high vocal delivery and sparse-yet-loud keyboards surrounded by a truly inspiring drum line. And “Hand It Over” showcases them at their most soulful. The chorus has VanWyngarden surrounded by a Young Americans-esque backing group, while Goldwasser does his best 10CC impression.
But let’s get to the meat, the entree, the fête de rois: the title track, “Little Dark Age.” Honestly, it was incredibly hard to write this section because every time I went back to listen to it, I had to stop everything and just...listen. I didn’t make a “Best Singles of 2017” list last year because spots 12 through 1 would have been “Little Dark Age.” The song is dense and dark, it is goth and cyberpunk, it is so gloriously brilliant that I never don't have it stuck in my head. Even as the album’s longest track, it is still not long enough. Careers are made off songs like this, and MGMT already had a career and burned it down for fun. This much talent is not fair; I’m enraged and melting at the same time.
“I grieve in stereo / The stereo sounds strange”
Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded for less.
