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MGMT
Brighton, Pressure Point
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Article
written by Alex S
Mar 10, 2008.
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Anyone hoping to hear ‘oversized technicolor psychedelic indie’ all jumbled up with some ‘silky soul, power pop, electronica and dance’, as MGMT have hitherto been described, would have been bitterly disappointed this evening. MGMT delivered a masterclass in humourless, non-ironic, American stadium rock. It felt like we’d taken some acid in the sixties and had never come back. I guess the warning signs were there from the beginning. Bob Dylan on the P.A. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Vanwyngarden tuning up their own guitars to ‘keep it real’. Vanwyngarden in particular, stunningly good-looking though he is with those Aegean Sea blues eyes looked every bit the American rock star. Headband and jeans, curly hair like furious shredded wheat tumbling down his slacker t-shirt. Thank God for small mercies; at least they weren’t wearing wings.
The band played every song from their debut album Oracular Spectacular with the strange omission of the excellent Kids. Yet with the glorious exception of Electric Feel, a magnificent, breathless Prince/Parliament funk-out straight from the seventies, MGMT shoe-horned into every song an interminable guitar grunge. Live there was none of producer Dave Fridmann’s (Flaming Lips, Mercury Revs) prog-rock, psychedelic infusion, although why anyone wants to reproduce the likes of Yes and Donovan on vinyl once again is beyond me. This was heads down, no-nonsense anthem rock. Drowning Pool without the subtlety, or Whitesnake for those of you over thirty. As the latest New York band to be hailed ‘the next big thing’ they possess a peculiar musical gift that is to be able to reproduce the mind numbing odious musical clichés of the past in a way that represents itself as maverick, daring and unconventional. Ok. That’s a bit harsh. They were superb musicians. And they managed to make us feel we were not, after all, in a soulless room above a pub but somewhere between Woodstock and Knebworth. And it was certainly entertaining. They are fascinating to watch. And they are clearly destined for great things. And Time to Pretend is a marvellous pop single. And people here liked them. But as Peep Show’s Super Hans once said, “people like Coldplay and voting for the Nazis. You can’t trust people Jez”.
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