MGMT

Seldom has a ‘difficult’ second album made such a song and dance about its unwillingness to crowd please than 2010’s Congratulations. Just two years previously, Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden had been pictures of peppy, preppy excess: neon-daubed party boys touting a clown-car full of killer hooks. But at some stage the party turned sour and MGMT decided they didn’t like their squeaky late-teen fan-base anymore. As LP number three comes around, it is obvious that the duo haven’t much changed their opinion.
While not as obtuse as Congratulations, nonetheless it’s a project that expects you to work hard for its love, with melodies that flutter in and out of focus and choruses that pack up and leave almost the moment they arrive. If there’s a unifying ambiance, it’s sort of psychedelic pastoral-ism with glimmers of darkness – Wicker Man meets Burning Man. Opener ‘Alien Days’ sounds like an obscure Donovan track recorded in a leaky basement; the occasionally zippy ‘Cool Song Number 2’ suggests Piper at the Gates of Dawn-era Pink Floyd, though here the blinky-eyed tweeness feels like a clinical choice. And so it goes, wispy fragment piled upon fragment. MGMT, it is increasingly clear, are a band at a crossroads. At least on Congratulations they knew they wanted to piss off as many people as possible (even if they denied it at the time). Here, it feels as if they don’t know what they want or where they are going.

Key Track: 'Cool Song Number 2"