MGMT

MGMT

In “Kids” and “Time To Pretend” (2008)  MGMT may have had two of the best indie rock dance singles since the genre coalesced out of the collective consciousness of the yungins (thank God they didn’t invent a music style I hated, I might start feeling old), but since then they seem to be more bent on confounding expectations than endlessly repeated attempts at creating celebratory fellow-feeling. Actively eschewing the fame the club singles have brought them, their new album, Congratulations (2010), has been, shall we say, polarizing.

Probably no one expected (or hoped) that the title track off this follow-up would lope along like The Band’s “The Weight”, or that there would be so much of the meandering twee of Belle and Sebastien. And it’s not just the lack of club anthems in the songwriting; the Lady Gaga sized synths snares and kicks are gone altogether, too. It’s almost like an entirely new band. Talk about asserting your artistic rights.

Plenty of people are following them down this path though, as can be heard in the crowd reaction to this live clip of Congratulations (and here’s a much better sounding version of the same song, live in Prospect Park last summer before anyone had heard it), and anyway the shout-along favorites are still the property of (the) MGMT even if they’re out of production for the moment; here’s a pre-Fuji peak at how the two sides of the band are coming together in the live show.

Nonetheless, I love the early hits too much not to pump them up. While “Kids” and “Time To Pretend” both follow the same formula of utterly sick synth foundation and oddly effective cheesy synth lead, not to mention grooves that will part your corpus callosum like the Red Sea, if I was on a desert island and a genie in a bottle granted me one of the two songs to play to St. Peter to trick him into letting me into heaven, I’d play him this one. Not even a priest, a rabbi, and a nun walking into a bar could deny that.

-Kern