CD of The Week

I approached MGMT’s latest effort as fearfully as I approach new material from any of my most beloved bands. Will I still love them after this? I always ask. In the case of MGMT, the answer was yes. I was certainly moved by the intricately layered sound and dry yet poignant lyrics. But I also was also left with no desire whatsoever to draw comparisons to Oracular Spectacular or even the Time To Pretend EP because at this point, I think it’s pretty clear that MGMT doesn’t want anyone to. So with that, I will jump in.

What grabs me about this album is the cohesion created with so many disparate, but obviously harmonic, sources of musical inspiration. Take “Introspection,” for instance. There’s a guitar and drum line akin to Elvis Presley’s more disco-flavored “Suspicious Minds,” but then the whole chorus ripples out to fill in that alternate psychedelic dimension that Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser seem bent on not only occupying, but also ruling. On another note, we have “A Good Sadness,” which could vocally be confused for Avey Tare any day, yet the instrumentals are much crisper (though no less interesting) than anything Animal Collective has ever done, aside from the oddball Merriweather Post Pavilion.

Still, it’s not just the sound that’s gripping on MGMT. The lyrics, though carefully concealed under music in some tracks (most notably “Astro-Mancy”), have a clear message. In “Mystery Disease,” for example, listeners are urged not to fall hard into the fallacy of complacency, and in “Alien Days,” we are forced to reflect on what might have brought us there.

For those insisting that MGMT must be a hipster pop band in order to stay relevant, there is “Your Life Is A Lie” and “Plenty of Girls In The Sea,” but while these tracks are superb in their own right, it’s time to give up the dream of MGMT as a soft-core indie band. We’re just not going to find their stuff on the soundtracks of HBO original series anymore, and to me, that is more than okay.