OMG It's MGMT

MGMT are in the firing line. With a hugely successful official debut album under their belts in the form of the aptly named Oracular Spectacular, their follow-up was one of the most eagerly-awaited rock’n’roll events of 2010. The record business needs good news stories and the hope was that this would be one of them. First time out they went double platinum in Ireland (Sony Ireland made this their most successful territory in the world), platinum in the UK and Australia and gold in the US, among other markets, the latter with almost 600,000 sales to their credit.

With the right follow-up, industry insiders argued, they could blossom into one of the hottest acts on the planet. Any band with a debut that sells two million, give or take a few, has to be a contender for selling five with its sequel – or ten if they get really lucky. MGMT’s debut peaked at a modest No. 38 in the US charts. This time out, if Sony in the US could match Ireland’s performance with Oracular Spectacular and get them to No. 5, who knows what global sales stats they might rack up? But, of course, you need the album with which to woo the yet-to-be-converted. And it might help if those who had been turned on by Oracular Spectacular were immediately convinced by what they heard.
No such luck. Instead, Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden have been plunged into controversy on a grand scale. The ether has been boiling with fan reactions that border on accusations of betrayal: this is not MGMT as we know and love them. Goldwasser himself has acknowledged that fans are really, really angry at the band for turning their back on radio-friedly pop. And the truth is that right now, almost no one can hear the potential hit singles on Congratulations. In fact the band themselves hinted that they might not want to release any tracks at all from the record as singles.
Reviewing their Academy performance in Hot Press, Ed Power was among those confused, if not downright disturbed by their transformation. “It might be more accurate,” he wrote, reflecting on Goldwater’s acknowledgement of fans’ anger, “to say that MGMT’s fan base is deeply baffled as to why the musicians who wrote ‘Kids’ – surely one of the finest singles of the past decade – should wish to inflict on our eardrums a 12-minute slab of droopy, drony noodling such as ‘Siberian Breaks’, recreated in all its obtuse glory at The Academy.”
Why indeed? Their debut was a piece of brilliantly wrought, in your face, mostly madly danceable electro-pop. In Ireland and the UK in particular ‘Kids’ struck a chord, turning into one of the anthems of 2008. Fans were gagging for more: if they could do the same, only better, then surely world domination would follow. But, of course, that sort of thinking leaves one, vital factor out of the equation. Some people play the game by being predictable. Others choose to defy expectations. And, just occasionally they are rewarded for their ambition. Which, in MGMT’s case, is not entirely out of the question. Congratulations might yet turn out to be a slow-burner, the kind of record that takes a while to understand but travels even further in the long run. In the meantime, what we have to discuss is a record that defines both the perils and the joys of that old chestnut, artistic freedom...

The Band That Never Was
When they met at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden were still in their teens. They started to jam together – and in their heads that’s what they’ve been doing ever since. They never even got around to properly starting a band, if Ben (the smaller, bespectacled, one) is to be believed.
“It was never really a band,” he says with emphasis. “It was just an extension of us hanging out. We weren’t trying to get attention or trying to make it into any sort of serious endeavour. It was just something to do.”
Andrew elaborates on the origins of their project in a nostalgic drawl.
“We met at some point early on in our Freshman year,” he recalls. “We were about eighteen and were living in these dorm complexes and we were hanging out in my hall. I don’t really know about the first few times we hung out, but I remember one of the first times, this guy had a church Hammond organ and a bass guitar and a Yamaha keyboard and people were telling us to shut up because we were jamming for thirty hours. But we knew there was a connection there, so we started making music using Ben’s laptop.”
Far from setting out to produce hit singles, they saw themselves in an experimental indie-come-dance mould.
“We were listening to Sonic Youth and Aphex Twin and Funkadelic,” Andrew elaborates. “We were just making all this electronic stuff using Reason and Fruity Loops. Soon after, we played a show where I was wearing a pink jumpsuit and was flailing around the ground a lot and we played all this electronic noise.”
Which sounds like great gas entirely! Andrew laughs to himself and looks into the middle distance like a cherubic Vietnam veteran who’s seen too much.
“We really weren’t thinking that this was a real band at all.”
Real band or not, the duo, then called The Management, recorded the Time To Pretend EP, and seemed destined to go their separate ways, as college friends are wont to do, until Andrew received an email from Columbia Records requesting their signatures on a recording contract. Before you could say Batman, with David Fridmann handling production duties, Oracular Spectacular was in the bag, and the duo were donning capes on The Late Show, playing the festival circuit, and listening to their own songs spilling out of a radio and accompanying skeletal fashion models on Paris catwalks. Or that’s what it must have seemed like, when the roller coaster was in full flight.
They don’t seem hugely comfortable with the extent to which they became public property. There is a wariness about them now that may reflect an inner hurt at the battering they’ve been getting. But they also seem at odds with the game, as if being pop stars, out there on the promo trail, is in itself a source of anxiety. “I don’t like having to repeat things over and over again,” Andrew tells me.
Paris Hilton can sleep easy: natural born media sluts they are not. Indeed, VanWyngarden confirms that they’ve turned down the offer of high-profile supports with U2, Lady Gaga, Coldplay and Foo Fighters because “we really didn’t want to do any of that.”

Return Of The Merry Pranksters
On the contrary, there is a cussedness about MGMT’s approach that in the long run may garner them a more enduring kind of critical respect. At their Academy show in Dublin, as Ed Power reported last issue with a degree of alarm, they performed a piss-taking karaoke version of their hit song ‘Kids’. But might this not, instead, be viewed as the iconoclastic gesture of a band who have a healthy disregard for pop orthodoxy? Similarly, the first cut from their new album was the intriguingly wired but relatively unmelodic single, ‘Flash Delirium’. They could hardly make it clearer that they don’t see themselves as popstars in the traditional sense, whose role it is to whack out note-perfect facsimiles of their Greatest Hits.
In response to which, the most relevant question might be: why did we ever think this was the mould they were cast in? And why were people so slow to recognise that these pranksterish tendencies were there, in MGMT’s DNA from the start? Back when they met, after all, they were studying music and listening to a lot of hardcore experimental art noise from the classical music world.
“I think the experimental music scene was a big influence on the band in a weird way,” Ben agrees. “With those guys it’s all about the approach to making music and it’s all about what that music means and it always involves messing with the formula a little bit. We took a lot away from that, but we didn’t want to make serious academic music. The fact is, a lot of those guys were really just
having fun.”
He may think that I’m giving him a dubious look.
“Although they were able to analyse what they did in highbrow terminology, they were really just about having fun,” he insists.
Seen in the context of this kind of anarchic artistic fun, the diverse responses ‘Flash Delirium’ garnered on the blogosphere don’t faze them in the slightest.
“I think we’re never going to be able to escape that desire we had early on to confuse people and throw them off and change it up a lot,” says Andrew.
It’s a laudable ambition. Some fans may wonder, however, did they need to go so far out there.
“I think we found a different way to do that with this album,” he adds. “To make music that we think of as pop music, but which will hopefully freak some people out and make some people happy and confuse people and all sorts of stuff. That said, I didn’t read any criticism that made me feel bad about it!”

Letting The Music Take Its Own Shape
Of course the fact that they connected along the way with sound architect, Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom, Jason Pierce’s partner in Spacemen 3, was also a key factor in defining the final shape of Congratulations.
“We weren’t really sure what kind of collaboration it was gonna be, or what we would do,” Ben told Hot Press while the album was still in gestation. “But he came out while we were recording and we’ve become really good friends. He has amazing ideas and he’s been really good at helping us figure out what’s really important. When I first heard Spacemen 3 it took me a little while to realise how amazing the music was. Yes, at first it sounds really simple, and if you’re not really listening for certain things you can skip over them. Pete’s approach to making music is really amazing. We’ve been learning a lot from him.
“He played us a lot of really simple music,” he added. “There’s enough going on to keep your attention, but when you really listen to it, there aren’t that many things happening. It’s really elegant. And we’re hopefully going for something like that, this time around, not having two hundred things all happening at once.”
And so it’s proved. Whether the decision to minimise melody and get into a more hypnotic kind of droning, heavily psychedelic music has delivered something of lasting artistic importance remains to be seen: either way, in the meantime, they seem to be feeling pleased about the fact that they at least have got tongues wagging.
“Yeah, actually we had fun watching the reaction!” Ben reflects, though there is no accompanying smile. “And we made a really cool video for ‘Flash Delirium’. I suppose if we had it our way, we’d have put that song out a little bit closer to the album. It is the most all-over-the-place song on the album and it’s hard, out of context of the album, to get a song like that. Particularly for someone who only knows ‘Kids’ or ‘Time To Pretend’, to suddenly hear this weird song... it must be a bit strange. At the same time we’re really happy to be doing something that people feel like they need to react to.”
What was the big difference between recording Congratulations – to my mind a very good if far less immediate album – and Oracular Spectacular?
“Well, we were working with our live engineer Billy Bennett,” says Andrew. “And Sonic Boom was there as a co-producer. But we were still producing it and recording it ourselves and working with the live band a little bit. The live band was in Malibu with us and we wanted the album to have more of a live feel, so they put down tracks on it. We were listening to a lot of acoustic-driven psychedelic folk music like Great Speckled Bird and Euphoria. We wanted to have more long-form melodies... to kind of tell a melodic story.”
They stress, however, that they didn’t think too long and hard about it all. It may not be the way their critics would like them to operate, but there is an organic aspect to the way they work.
“We didn’t really have a plan outlined for it before we started recording it,” says Ben. “At first we wanted to write songs and record them in a few months and just get it over with. I think we just wanted to get over the whole sophomore album pressure. But it ended up turning into a much longer process.
“It was fun,” he adds, using the word again, as if to reassure himself as much as me. “We were really living in a world over the last year where it was all about recording music and trying different things. In the end we realised that it all made sense, because it was all part of the same process – and not because we set out to make an album that made sense.”

Out On The Road Again...
Going against stereotype, their record label Columbia seem to be cool with whatever MGMT chose to do. Ben, for one, appreciates the vote of confidence, suggesting that it’s a sign of the times – and he might just be right. All the old certitudes have been uprooted. No one knows for sure where the money is or how to tap into it.
“I think it’s really cool making music right now,” he reflects. “Because you can honestly turn to someone at your label these days and say, ‘We have this idea, and we really think it can work,’ and with everything so up in the air in this industry, there’s not really anyone who can say with certainty, ‘Your idea is not going to work, that’s not the way things are done’. The truth is that nobody knows how things are going to be done from now on. I think that’s really cool. The attitude seems to be just ‘go with it’ and we like that.”
On the other hand, despite this uncertainty and all previous indications of hip prankster indifference, Andrew also talks about making a career out of this music thing; he seems pretty certain that long-term careers in music are still a possibility, which will be reassuring for all of those young bands currently starting out on the road to perdition. This is despite the fact that Andrew himself clearly doesn’t like certain elements of
the job.
“I like touring but it does make me anxious, to have my life so scheduled out for the best part of a year and a half,” he says. “I enjoy playing shows – but my ultimate goal with music is to get to a place where I can get a lot of quiet time and have a home where I can just chill out all the time and surf and listen to music.”
You know you could just stop all this and go and do that if you really wanted.
“Yeah, I guess,” says Andrew, sounding unconvinced. “But I like playing... I just don’t like the travel side of it.”
Clearly, it’s an inconvenience he’s going to have to put up with for a while yet. Whatever else you can say, it’s clear that there is plenty of hard work in the offing, if MGMT want to turn the contrary but nonetheless beguiling Congratulations into the hit record the music business was hankering after. There may be a long road ahead of them, but if they get there, we really will have something to celebrate: a triumph of sheer musical bloody-mindnedness.
Watch this space, man...