They’re Back! It’s Real! Let’s Get Crazy! A Review of MGMT’s Loss of Life

By: Sebastian Cruz, Contributor

Guys did you hear the MGMT are back. Like totally back. Like totally not gonna drop off of the face of the Earth again, and even in death, will be playing “Electric Feel” all the way up the stairway to heaven back. 

The subject of this examination is perhaps an exemplary, well, example of the music trends dominating the American rock music scene in the previous decade before the previous decade: MGMT. From their apocryphal start as pop music lambasters, to their full metamorphosis into the sort of pop group they lambasted in the first place. They seamlessly combined warped synth-pop and progressive songwriting that bridged the gap between hipsters and club DJs.. Their eventual fall from the mainstream makes these two Connecticutters an independent rock/pop tragedy for the ages.

It’s difficult to overstate the sheer meteoric presence MGMT had in their heyday (circa 2005-2009.) Their career-defining debut Oracular Spectacular was sheer indie pop ekstasis. Its tentpole trifecta of singles “Time to Pretend”, “Kids”, and “Electric Feel” trickled down to my own little corner of the world when I was still kicking it in Kindergarten. 

And that was precisely the problem, at least according to the two wunderkinds behind the band: Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser. They had their origins as a noise rock or electronica band, but for the vast majority of their careers, they had at least one foot in pop music. The other foot, however, landed in mystical, often quite dark or at the very least risqué, lyrical themes. Perhaps presciently, “Time to Pretend” is a burbling ode to selling out and living the rockstar life while acknowledging that the life is a completely vacuous one. Hell yeah.

Congratulations, released March 2010, would see the band embracing their slightly proggy electronic tendencies. And they were completely shameless about it. Multiple songs dedicated to their most important influences. A twelve-minute orchestral synth odyssey right in the middle. A folk-pop title track that’s a very clear expression of their trepidation regarding their sudden success. The album introduced a bevy of lyrical themes they would return to in later projects.

The journey gets a little wonkier. 2013 saw them return with a self-titled album rife with odd production aesthetics, more obtuse song structures and a generally dour, alien atmosphere. It was unlike anything they had done or would do after (I personally believe it’s overdue for a major reappraisal—10 years is more than enough!) The chilly reception forwarded to Congratulations and the even chillier reception towards MGMT put the band in a slight cryogenic freeze. Little Dark Age, released February 2018, saw the band refining their sprawling stylistic endeavors into more straightforward songwriting. It was their most acclaimed release in years, critics and fans alike.

So what the hell happened for them to disappear all over again??? Well, splitting from Columbia Records and a globe-spanning pandemic, for two. The six years were dotted with occasional one-off singles or the 11•11•11 live record. An entire world of independent pop music, some in their direct influence, was made. Yet neither the pop or indie world really felt comfortable for either of them. They were an old-guard cohort of psychedelic, whose songwriting styles hew towards more King Crimson than Roxy Music. The acoustic guitar took up significant space in their musical merry-go-round, and on Loss of Life, it actually supersedes the keyboards.

Damn. MGMT have written more earworm synth hooks than any pop group around today. To strip themselves of their ol’ reliable—no, their Excalibur—is, if nothing else, ballsy. Such is their modus operandi for the past 3 albums or so. Consistency is for suckers and pudding chefs, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser continue to mold these styles around their songwriting prowess, prodding and squeezing and gluing to see what works. 

The album’s introduction, cheekily titled “Loss of Life, Pt. 2”, is a slow, soft goodbye to the electronic world, while also establishing the album’s lyrical focus on the natural and supernatural (rendered in a moody reading of a 6th century Welsh poem.) As far as mood-setters go, though, none shine as brightest as the leadoff single “Mother Nature.” The pastoral flourishes of the opening moments eventually balloon onwards and outwards, and the lyrics take a solemn look at the journey the band has trekked and how, no matter what, they need to stay true to themselves. They invoke castles and cleansing fires, but their allusions to a contemporary “billionaire’s row” grounds them in the stakes of their own reality. 

It would be slightly reductive to label the band’s experiments as “whimsical”, but in the case of Loss of Life, the whimsy seems more apparent once the band strips away the candy-coated atmospherics, the songwriting can feel unsupported by the palette they leave themselves with. Twin late-album duds “Phradie’s Song” and “I Wish I Was Joking” suffer from being two more folk-pop jams with little connective tissue. “Phradie” begins as a chiming, slow-moving piece that is jammed with effects, but it eventually melts into electronic noodling (very pretty electronic noodling, mind you, courtesy of Daniel Lopatin) after three and a half minutes of nothing special. “Joking” is even worse off—more listless, less impressive VanWyngarden-brand vocals and a hook that’s so tedious I really do wish he was joking too. 

The band feels almost detrimentally beholden to the indie-pop album sequencing they started out with. Now, I know that a 10 song, 40-minute album is nobody’s idea of an unsatisfying record length, but you can really feel MGMT’s desire to really stretch out their legs and see where they walk to. “Mother Nature”, “People in the Streets”, and “Nothing Changes” continuously swell and expand, but too often it can feel like they’re rushing through the motions just so they can fit it all in.

If nothing else, Loss of Life is a document of MGMT’s continuing maturity. Even on Little Dark Age, an album with not only one but two dedications to long-lasting friendship, could still feel like it’s getting your goat. The use of “fuck” might be the most revealing difference; LDA quite emphatically tells us “go fuck yourself!” But on the power ballad “Nothing Changes,” VanWyngarden swoons and sways about his inability to truly grow up. He illustrates his point plainly: “This is what the birds must have been squawking about/Right before the dream was ending/And maybe you'd have heard if you'd stopped fucking around/When it was time to stop pretending”. 

The invocation of their earliest hit is exactly how far the band will go to say that they’re done with the past. The closing actual title-track is the realization point, where that “loss of life” becomes a real threat, a true presence in their lives as artists that they only ever talked about in song. They’ve been “undressing cosmic knots/what remains of disconnected dots”, but they “learn to love [their] loss of life”, their life being the hits, the non-hits, the duds and the dubs. They start their new life, this album, with the end. For beginnings and endings are closest of all.

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