How many mgmt albums are there

Skip to content. Share via: 0 Shares. Previous Post Jet Albums Ranked. ReturnofRock is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon. Share via. Copy Link. This reaction was to no fault of the band.

These virtues were received tepidly at best. Worse still were the two moments where the band pulled from their current mid-period. That track deserved to fizzle out upon arrival. To hear it in the resulting interviews since Oracular Spectacular , the duo immediately bored themselves with the style that made them popular. Perhaps they should have chased their more experimental muse under a different moniker; the decision to keep at it under the MGMT banner came across as an obstinate effort to reclaim their brand back from the fans.

Their new songs are vital, compelling works, yet in concert MGMT still feel like an entity imprisoned by their past. Just a little over a decade into their existence, MGMT are already treated as a legacy act running their course to dutifully let us remember an earlier, simpler time in our lives. And we should be grateful! Reliving the past is one of the most enjoyable ways to spend the present.

As an independent website, we rely on our measly advertising income to keep the lights on. In the background, barking an order for a room-service club sandwich, lurks their manager, who has helpfully turned up dressed as a hard-assed American manager.

He seems to be wearing almost exactly the same clothes as Colonel Tom Parker in the famous photo in which Elvis points a gun at him. The attention to detail extends to the trilby, which sits above the kind of face you automatically imagine with a cigar sticking out of. At the centre of the room Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden sit, staring at a table groaning with food and drink.

It is, they concede, all rather a long way from Wesleyan University, the famously liberal establishment labelled "the coolest college ever" by the US press, where MGMT began as a kind of LSD-inspired joke, taking the stage dressed as giant snowmen, playing the theme tune from Ghostbusters for 45 minutes, giving obnoxious interviews to the campus newspaper "bullshitting about all our groupies and drinking whiskey and playing Russia" and "trying to fuck with people by making the poppiest music imaginable, that we thought was really stupid".

Depending on your perspective, it all sounds either like iconoclastic fun or perfectly insufferable student wackiness of the look-at-this-picture-of-an-alien-saying-take-me-to-your-dealer school; either way, the band had more or less run its course when a major label heard an EP they had made 18 months previously, decided that the songs Goldwasser and VanWyngarden thought were really stupid weren't stupid at all, and signed them. And all of a sudden that song was, like, a single, and we had to play it every day for … two … years.

Now we're It's hard to keep that naiveyear-old-at-college philosophy going when you're writing a second album. You see what it can do to people. People strive for that, where everything is taken care of for you and you don't have to think for yourself at all. We got a glimpse of that and shrunk back. We thought, hmmm, I dunno.

Let's write a really weird album. Indeed, a naysayer might suggest that VanWyngarden and Goldwasser make the most of their current surroundings, room-service smorgasbord and all, because on the evidence of Oracular Spectacular's follow-up, Congratulations, they're not going to be staying in places like this for very much longer.

It's not that Congratulations is wildly uncommercial in the way that, say Merzbow's 50 CD box set of screaming noise was, merely that it's co-produced by former Spacemen 3 frontman Sonic Boom — not, it has to be said, the first name that springs to mind when you're looking for someone with the Topfriendly production touch — and doesn't really sound anything like their debut, or indeed anything that's ever come within sniffing distance of the charts.

You're probably the first person we've ever spoken to who knows about them. The first track to be heard from the album was Song for Dan Treacy, which not only namechecks the perennially troubled leader of the Television Personalities, but mimics that band's spindly indie-psych style as well, an intriguing state of affairs given the disaster that ensued when MGMT invited Treacy to support them in Norwich and Oxford a couple of years back.