Music

This is the story of two crazy kids who wrote some deliberately obtuse songs while getting high at college, before going their separate ways, moving to different cities and forgetting all about their pop dreams. The twist is that, by total accident, they end up signing to a major record label a year later and then have to relearn what they have unlearned before their triumphant appearance, confusing America, on David Letterman. If this was a movie, it would star Aaron Carter and Stifler from ‘American Pie’ and you’d want your money back afterwards. In real life, fortunately, it stars likeable cosmos cadets Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser and it’s all good.

‘Yeah, we go through different ways of justifying it,’ says an audibly puzzled VanWyn. ‘Especially a year ago when we were writing songs and we were just signed, we had no idea why it was happening and how it came about. We would convince ourselves that some sort of galactic beings were guiding us along this weird path. And yeah, we still don’t really know what’s going on. ‘Cause we really haven’t put that much effort into getting to this point.’

MGMT’s freak thing is a woozy, complex and omnipresent sound which encompasses surf, psych, various electronicas, prog and shoegaze. Generally all at the same time. At its heart is a duality of wide-eyed spacey ’70s optimism and melancholy modernist languor.
‘Yeah, I think that’s pretty accurate,’ says VanWyn. ‘The former would be a good encapsulation of the feelings we had as freshmen in college. Idealistic and having the whole world ahead of us. We were just happy-go-lucky, going crazy on campus. But at the same time we were nostalgic for childhood and there was the threat of post-college life coming. And then the modernist languor whatever is probably a result of post-graduation chaos and existential whatever… like, what are we doing?’ Watching BBC armageddo-porn horrorfest ‘Threads' probably didn’t exactly cheer them up either. ‘I was excited when I downloaded it, but it’s pretty relentless,’ VanWyn understates. ‘Really, really depressing. I certainly never want to see it again.’

They’ve just released their proper debut single, ‘Time To Pretend’, which presents a glam-prog manifesto for the Paris Hilton-esque pursuit of fame, adoration and an eventual vomit-assisted death as a kind of final solution sponsored by the E! channel. It turns out, however, that this actually comes from the band’s college-era in-joke.
‘It’s weird,’ says VanWyn, ‘I wrote those lyrics when I was a senior at school – at the time I was referencing this ongoing kind-of-ironic thing that Ben and I would talk about, like, “Yeah, when we’re rock stars and we’re selling out…” We never thought that we were gonna be signed to a label or anything. I don’t wanna say that the lyrics are coming true, but it’s very strange, considering how the song ends.’ (Yeah, anyway, we like our version better, so fuck you, MGMT.)

MGMT’s album, ‘Oracular Spectacular’, is released this week, and we can heartily recommend it, if only because their sonic eccentricity is so unforced compared with a lot of try-hard ‘we’re mad, us’ contemporaries.
‘We wanted to seem like we’d put in a ton of thought into some overarching aesthetic,’ says VanWyn. ‘But really, it’s kinda just coming off naturally. I think we’re just freaks by nature.’