MGMT is MGMT‘s third record.
One of my professors used to say, “Some books you read. Some books read you.” I think this is a record that is going to read a lot of people. It certainly read me.
Honestly, the reason I picked it up was I saw so many reviews that were basically “what is this weird quarter-life crisis nonsense??!!” which as it turned out were right, in a way. The songs are more introspective – there is actually a song called Introspection, which I love – and do grapple with more adult topics, specifically, the alarming sensation of being an adult, and all of it is filtered through a musical fun house mirror.
Or: MGMT’s answer to “What do you do after you become super-famous, then make a record your fans kind of don’t like because it wasn’t the same as the first one?” is “Become aggressively weird.”
Here are three songs from the record, all of which are very good. I decided to share them in video form because the videos are also aggressively weird.
Alien Days: colonial-era alien abduction as a metaphor for how your most precious things are sometimes caviar for unfeeling creatures. (Ooooh subtle, MGMT!) Also, aliens doing ballet.
Your Life is a Lie: A bit of a modern echo of Once In A Lifetime; the moments after you have realized you have let the water hold you down and you don’t know where you are and you have to tell this nice lady next to you that she is not your beautiful wife.
Cool Song No. 2, in which Michael K. Williams engages in some skullduggery and then a dude slowly turns into a tree.
