Words:
Andrew Future
American duo, MGMT
have taken both sides of the Atlantic by storm with their futuristic
hook-laden electro. Andrew Future discusses the Mayan apocalypse, fantasy
festivals and frying synthesisers with the duo, and finds out why they’re
off to Jamaica to record ‘the best album ever’.
Only the truly ignorant
could deny that MGMT are one of the most ambitious, audacious and truly
great new bands in a long time.
The worldwide smash
‘Time To Pretend’ has been giving college hipsters and Skins
fans alike a sexy fresh summer hit, while the Brooklyn duo’s master-class
in musical depth and arty futurism will wow the Reading and Leeds festivals
when they perform in a few weeks time.
Pronounced
‘management’, MGMT are one big oxymoron. They’re Americans
who understand irony. They fervently claim to not be ‘indie’,
despite dousing everything in buckets of reverb and citing The Fiery
Furnaces and Captain Beefheart as influences.
“We’re
definitely not an indie band,” declares lead singer, Andrew. “We’re
on a major label and we don’t listen to indie music.”
But what’s
most commendable is how they avoid sounding like any of them. Instead,
their debut long player drips with ideas and bursts with hooks, sounding
somewhere between Air and early Bowie.
Andrew Van Wyngarden
and Ben Goldwasser are two wildly obtuse perfectionists who seem to
have accidentally stumbled across being Air for the jilted generation,
with generous injections of Prince and The Flaming Lips along the way.
Like some of the
better Beck records, their debut Orancular Spectacular grows with every
listen, and once it’s dispensed with the radio stompers (‘The
Youth’, ‘Kids’ and opener, ‘Time To Pretend’)
they open up a hotbed of ideas and more expansive epics. They successfully
meld glam psychedelic with intricate and tightly woven electro sound-scapes
without even the slightest whiff of cliché.
A band like MGMT
just couldn’t exist in England. The music is too idealistic. The
sugar rush of their soaring laments to youth and stardom often sees
simple bass lines explode into symphonic, Pink Floyd orchestration.
Meanwhile, ample
floods of shoe-gazing melody carry forth into Prince-shagging glam pop
as they run around like two toddlers in Toys ’R’ Us pressing
every button and pulling every lever.
“One
of our goals is to make people really happy then make them really sad,”
says Ben. “I don’t think we have a master plan at all. We
just wanna make albums as long as we can.”
Indeed, when MGMT,
formerly known as The Management, formed at Wesleyan University at the
end of 2001, it wasn’t with the intention of supporting Radiohead
or playing the world’s major festivals.
“Now that
we’re happy and comfortable with our normal live set, we’re
starting to incorporate some of the more obnoxious elements back into
our live set. Like obnoxious encores, like our cover of Van Morrison’s
‘Brown Eyed Girl’,” adds Adam. “Production is
really written into the music. We do it piece by piece. It’s not
like writing a skeletal structure for a song, but very much doing it
part by part and working it up.”
Much of MGMT’s
early work was produced on laptops using programs like Reason.
“It was all
about layers,” Ben explains, “adding and subtracting things
that were happening. We began writing without structures and we’ve
kept a lot of that. Many sections don’t repeat themselves.”
At some points,
there’s over 150 layers of sound booming out. But as trippy as
it gets, they’re pretty sober songwriters, as Andrew says:
“Psychotropics
don’t really fit into the writing process but it’s about
the experiences that come through in the music. We’ve seen things.
Once you’ve been in a confusion zone you never really leave it.
“There’s
maybe some slight mystical slant for some of the themes. We’re
not practicing any pagan rituals. We’ve done some weird shit but
we’re not pagans.”
What
weird shit?
“Light hearted satanic
rituals that have actual real life consequences.”
“I’ve never raised the dead, but I want a ouija board,”
Ben adds.
Andrew grew up in
Memphis while Ben started out in upstate New York. “Memphis was
very rock and blues orientated,” Andrew explains. “It’s
a pretty big city, it wasn’t hillbilly life or anything!”
Now the band is
set to leave the States behind and head out to Jamaica to write their
new record.
Andrew: It’s
gonna be a super laid back pop album, It’s gonna be so good. No
one else is gonna like it, but that doesn’t matter, cause it’ll
be so laid back.
Ben: This is what
we were like when did the first album. The last album we made was reactionary
in a way. We’d been making a lot of electronica stuff and wanted
to make it more of a rock album. I’m quite excited about the prospect
of making a proper electronic record.”
Andrew’s big
love of the moment is Safe As Milk, Captain Beefheart’s 1967 debut.
“I love Ry
Cooder’s guitar,” he says. “I just love the guitar
work on that album, it’s dry and dishevelled and always has two
guitars linking together, I think it’d be cool to have that.
“One
of our ultimate goals is to tour on a boat with a stage and all our
equipment and go from port to port and invite our friends on for shows,
and just do an island tour.”
How
is the festival circuit treating you?
Ben: We find ourselves playing
every night and we’re just figuring out how to start almost covering
our own songs. We’re seeing what new things we can come up with,
or it’s gonna go stale.
What
about curating a festival?
Andrew: I’d love to
curate a festival. Spectrum, Suicide, Helios Creed, Beach House The
Fiery Furnaces, Led Zeppelin, with The Fiery Furnaces headlining, featuring
Robert Plan.
So
are you expecting another Summer of Love?
Andrew: We’ll probably
have summers of love, but I don’t know about anyone else.
Ben: I only have summers of discontent. I’m really not looking
forward to spending any more summertime in New York.
And
where does the apocalypse fit into things then, if life is for partying?
Andrew: The kind of apocalypse
we were thinking of. I was thinking of a cooler apocalypse, more in
the Mayan view, more like a Revealing, an advance of the human race,
not where everybody died. Hopefully we’ll become cosmic entities
and all turn into beams of light.
Madonna would be
so proud.
