Beandon’s Musical Corner: MGMT carves a new sound in ‘Loss of Life’

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and contains subjective opinions, thoughts and critiques.

Welcome to a new and improved Beandon’s Musical Corner: The only place on campus for in-depth, exhaustive reviews on the latest releases in rock, jazz, experimental … and pretty much everything else. Brandon Rupp (also known by his mononymous musical title “beandon,” under which he releases music and DJs as KZSU’s Student Music Director) explores a new title and gives unfiltered feedback, regardless of the genre. Feel free to send him music — he would love to take a look!

Dear reader, put on your tinfoil hats. I have a question: Is it a coincidence that Ween’s last record, “La Cucaracha,” came out the same year, 2007, that MGMT debuted with “Oracular Spectacular”?

For the less imaginative among us, it may seem that the answer is a resounding yes. But Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser of MGMT have revealed themselves to be a spiritual successor to Dean and Gene Ween in many ways: they’re both quirky duos that love leapfrogging between disparate genres, leaning into their bizarre senses of humor, spotlighting the chameleon voices of their dynamic lead singers and masking chart-ready pop songs in layers of murk. Perhaps, I posit, reincarnation is real!

For fear of further alienating my readership, I’ll stop. Onto MGMT. 

I came to love these psych pop goofballs with their seminal progressive rock epic “Congratulations” (2010), which features the 12-minute behemoth “Siberian Breaks.” The album earned points by taking a page or two from the books of Mr. Bungle (listen to “Song for Dan Treacy” and “Disco Volante” back-to-back), Frank Zappa (“Brian Eno” is almost as much a tribute to Zappa as Eno himself) and more. In other words, it was fresh and fun prog — an utter rarity.

But that album is a long way from their humble beginnings as global superstars. While it is fair to say that they’ve only released three hit singles, what hits they have been! Most people have heard “Time to Pretend,” “Electric Feel” and “Kids,” and these tunes somehow haven’t lost their luster 17 years later. 

They released their strangest, though weakest record in 2013: the self-titled “MGMT.” It’s not terrible, but it simply doesn’t meet the standards the band has earned over their career. Then followed the wonderful “Little Dark Age” (2018), which featured contributions from Ariel Pink (another clear influence) and a title track that later hit big on TikTok. Then silence.

And, now we’re here. MGMT first hinted at their new album, “Loss of Life” through a cryptic Reddit post captioned “Just got done cooking L.O.L.” The emotionally inverse relationship between the grim title and its jaunty acronym is a testament to just how strange the resulting record sounds.

I could try to sum it up with a juxtapositional “[band] does [band]” soundbite: Ween does Meat Loaf, Aphex Twin does the Beatles, T-Rex does Dinosaur Jr.

Or I could complain that they didn’t continue the sound of their non-album single “In the Afternoon,” one of the best songs of the 2010s. But these all miss the point of the record. 

This record carves a new sound that is most reminiscent of their earlier self-titled misstep. However, it ends up faring much better. After a throwaway minute-long introduction to the album, we are hit with lead single “Mother Nature,” a gorgeous psychedelic breeze. The song immediately highlights that MGMT’s move to an independent label, Mom+Pop, has not diminished the quality of their production: they gleefully layer on Mercury Rev-esque flute melodies, crunchy bursts of guitar and textured synthesizer hums.

The following track, “Dancing in Babylon,” is another gem. It begins a trend that is littered throughout the rest of the album — power ballads plucked straight out of the ’80s. There, I’ve ripped the bandaid: this is an album of power ballads interspersed with a couple of rock tracks. Somehow, it works. 

It’s all in the attention to detail paid to every track. For example, listen to the bridge of the aforementioned track. Over a wonderfully cadencing chord progression, the lyrics feel uncharacteristically straightforward for VanWyngarden: “I wanna tell everyone I know I love you / I wanna touch the scars and break the chains that hold you.”

The interlocking vocals from Christine and the Queens, the first guest vocalist to appear on any MGMT record, just sell it.

“People in the Streets” is a bit harder to praise. It has some great guitar work and a groovy fretless bass, but the track takes its sweet time to become interesting. At least there is wild psychedelic soloing at the end. 

Two wildly different singles — the swaggering rocker “Bubblegum Dog” and psych folk ditty “Nothing to Declare” — are placed right in the middle of the tracklist. Both are wonderful, though the former has quickly cemented itself among my favorite MGMT songs.

A previously unreleased remnant of the “Little Dark Age” sessions, the track became popular on the strength of its odd title alone — I still have no idea what a “Bubblegum Dog” might be. The track represents MGMT at their most playful, with baroque harpsichord, chugging guitars and an unpredictable chord progression. It’s also a production marvel: Listen to those dissonant keyboard harmonies in the last chorus!

Some tracks lean into the prog weirdness of “Congratulations,” like the somewhat confusing “I Wish I Was Joking.” Meanwhile, deep cuts like “Phradie’s Song” would fit in on their 2013 self-titled record (as an album highlight, no less). The closing title track, “Loss of Life,” is much harder to describe. It balances glitchy drums with French horn arrangements, ultimately sounding like a scratched-up “Sgt. Peppers” vinyl.

I’ll leave you with the album’s biggest earworm for me: “Nothing Changes” is my favorite of the album’s power ballads. What makes the track so interesting is a central irony between the lyrics and instrumental — just as we’ve been hammered with the repeated lyric “Nothing’s going to change, believe me!” over a looping instrumental, the track explodes into a triumphant French horn solo. The song structure pokes a hole in the very idea that “nothing changes.”

Here, music itself becomes an undeniable counterargument to reactionary pessimism. The beauty of MGMT’s music is defined by an adventurous embrace of the constant current of progress. I don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

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