The 'Kids' who Fell to Earth

Irish festival-goers may fondly recall an appearance by MGMT at Oxegen 2008 that can only be described as total, unadulterated bedlam.
 
“Oh yeah, was that the one where a girl climbed up the scaffolding?” Ben Goldwasser asks. “That was pretty insane. It was our first big festival run we ever did. We were pretty surprised by how crazy that one was. That’s in the top three craziest reactions we’ve ever received in our entire career.”
The Connecticut duo’s pursuit of far-out psychedelic pop took a dip with their second album, Congratulations. Rather than replicate the catchy synth pop of their debut, they journeyed further into sonic space with a little help from producer and guru Peter Kimble, aka Sonic Boom, formerly of Spaceman 3.
It was a departure for the band that memorably sang on their breakthrough single ‘Time to Pretend’,  “Let’s make some music, make some money, find some models for wives.”
Their new self-titled third album lies someone between these two extremes. “It’s not as obviously catchy as some of the songs on our first album,” Goldwasser ventures. “There are still some people who expect everything we do to conform to that. However, there are enough people out there who want to change what we do with each album and go with us. Not everyone has had a positive reaction to it. That doesn’t bother me anymore. If everyone loved everything we’ve done we’d be doing something wrong.”
MGMT have been cited as a classic example of a band whose wildly successful debut album overshadows their subsequent career.
 “It’s been a bit difficult for us to get round the initial hype,” Goldwasser admits. “That wasn’t anything we anticipated at all. Some of it got a little bit out of control for a while. People built us up in such a crazy way that there was nowhere to go from there.
“I’m glad that we just moved on and kept experimenting, trying out different things and making music that makes us happy. I’m really glad that we’ve found an audience of people who are with us for that and who are excited that we didn’t just replicate our first album over and over again.
“I don’t even think we’d be able to do that if we tried. A lot of the big singles off the first album are over 10 years old. We wrote them in college. I think it would be pathetic if we were writing songs as if we felt the same way about things then as do now. We tend to back away from fame. We appreciate the attention but we want to keep the focus on the music.”
Ben Goldwasser met his fellow MGMT co-creator Andrew VanWyngarden in Wesleyan University in Connecticut, whose alumni include Jason Bourne creator Robert Ludlum. Initially, the duo just wanted to have a blast playing an epic version of the Ghostbusters theme tune in their college dorm.
“It was the first concert we ever played,” Goldwasser says. “It’s kind of indicative of how seriously we were taking the band at that point. We were just having fun.”
A formative influence on the fledgling duo was the ferocious experimentation of the seminal electronic protopunk duo Suicide.
“Much of what has influenced us isn’t music that people would associate with MGMT,” Goldwasser reflects. “So much of the music we listen to is really dark and noise based and not traditional pop. We have a really good time trying to blend those influences together. I think it’s interesting to see what you get when you combine all these influences.”
In addition to not wanting to re-hash past glories, or pursue the obvious route to alt-pop stardom, Goldwasser and VanWyngarden are not terribly interesting in playing the digital game of sharing every banal detail of their lives on Twitter and Facebook.
“It’s hard not to sound like a curmudgeon, but I’m not a teenager anymore,” Goldwasser says. “Young kids are the ones that are shaping these communities online in a lot of ways. There are a lot of cool things happening about it and if you approach it in the right way you can get something positive out of it. Ultimately there is too much marketing involved.”
“Marketing never catches up with what is truly happening in a moment when you’re trying to analyse it and I don’t see it ever catching up with reality. The music is the most important thing. It’s fun to get involved with all that stuff sometimes and we do realize that the Internet has also enabled more people to listen to us than we could have possibly imagined. At the same time we also want to maintain some distance.
“Social media dilutes the mystery of music and it’s something we don’t want to do. I don’t think anyone is particularly interested what we ate for breakfast anyway.”

MGMT is out now on Sony