MGMT
Little Dark Age
Release Date: Feb 9, 2018
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Sony Music
Music Critic Score
How the Music Critic Score works
Buy Little Dark Age from Amazon
Album Review: Little Dark Age by MGMT
Very Good, Based on 14 Critics
Based on rating 4
MGMT are about to make you feel old. The reason? It is just over 10 years since the Brooklyn duo released their standout statement on celebrity living, Time To Pretend. It shot them to prominence - and was backed by a substantial album, Oracular Spectacular - from where we still hear Electric Feel and Kids at the very least. The album was seen as surely just the prelude for a long stint at the top of the game.
Based on rating 4/5
Most of MGMT's career has been spent living in the shadow of their breakthrough debut album, Oracular Spectacular. Its many singles crashed mainstream rock radio back in 2008, and they've essentially never left--and it's not so difficult to understand why. "Time to Pretend" and "Electric Feel" are psychedelic pop written for massive stadiums and sporting events.
Based on rating 8.0/10
MGMT are a little young to be turning into tired old men. Yet, on the duo's fourth studio album Little Dark Age, co-band leaders Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser sound as if a lot is weighing them down: the current political climate (according to them, the title is meant to be reassuring that this bleak period will only be a tiny one), our tech addictions, regretting one's wasted time and modern dating. It's a lot of bitter pills to swallow in one go.
Based on rating 4/5
It's over 10 years since MGMT released 'Oracular Spectacular', a poptastic glitterball of an album that spawned hit singles 'Time To Pretend', 'Kids' and 'Electric Feel'. Three years later, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser baffled fair-weather fans with the acid-jazz soup that was 2010's 'Congratulations'. And the odyssey continued: 2013's 'MGMT' was an inaccessible curio, implying the band had long disappeared down the rabbit hole.
Based on rating 7.0/10
This could have been MGMT's last chance. The narrative around the duo is well known by now: College buddies stumble into a few fluke hits, capturing a generational mix of youthful exuberance and modern ennui. Then they rocket to stardom, only to spend the next two albums kicking against everything that fans, critics, and their record company expect of them.
Based on rating 3.5/5
You can never go home again, especially when home is your college dorm room. On their fourth LP, the studio scientists of MGMT do a great job evoking the fizzy, dizzy New Wave psychedelia of mid-00s hits like "Kids" and "Electric Feel," songs the duo cooked up while still at school at Wesleyan University. With their mix of poker-faced irony, lightly exotic sonics and neo-hippie whimsy, those songs, from MGMT's debut LP, 2007's Oracular Spectacular, helped make indie-pop a brighter place, and you could hear them echoed in hipster bands like Local Natives and Yeasayer as well as Top 40 opportunists like Foster the People.
Based on rating 3.5/5
It's been a little over a decade since the release of MGMT's debut album, Oracular Spectacular. For members Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, that's the difference between being twentysomething and thirtysomething: an obvious statement, maybe, but one that goes some way toward explaining the mood of Little Dark Age. Simple, unassuming, and a little dour, MGMT's fourth album is as much an encapsulation of the thirtysomething experience as Oracular Spectacular was of being in one's 20s.
Based on rating 7/10
It's an unfair fact of life that every new MGMT album must be compared to their 2008 breakthrough Oracular Spectacular. In the decade since its release rocketed the duo to stardom, many have clamoured for a return to that album's dayglo paganism, represented so well in the inescapable pop triptych of "Time to Pretend," "Electric Feel" and "Kids," Fans never understood that these incandescent singles were never what MGMT claimed to be about. The songs were larks, tongue-in-cheek commentaries on fame that, coincidentally, happened to be ….
Based on rating 6/10
After hitting it very big with their debut album and the song "Kids," MGMT dedicated themselves to making albums that would confuse and annoy people looking to hear more expansive, radio-friendly tunes like "Kids." Both 2010's Congratulations and 2013's self-titled record were informed by Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden's love of obscure psychedelia, oddball lyrics, and off-kilter strangeness. That they called in Sonic Boom to produce the former and Flaming Lips cohort Dave Fridmann to helm the latter says a lot about where the duo's minds resided. They weren't looking to top the charts; they wanted to do something weirder.
Based on rating C
– Download the episode | iTunes | Podchaser The Lowdown: A decade after their debut album, neo-psychedelic wunderkinds MGMT are back to reclaim their narrative. Little Dark Age is their first album in five years, and it follows two critically panned releases: 2010’s Congratulations and 2013’s MGMT, both of which veered so far into zany art-rock experimentation that it was hard for everyone but their core fanbase to keep up. Little Dark Age hews closer to traditional pop structures, making it their most accessible record since Oracular Spectacular.
Opinion: Excellent
MGMT is a great band who made their records out of order. I went to see Of Montreal on tour for their incredible psych pop anti-masterpiece Hissing Faunae in mid-2007. I had never heard of the opener so I went late and skipped them. It was MGMT. By the following year, they were playing Bonnaroo ….
Opinion: Excellent
For a group with such a major influence on the sound of 2010s alternative radio, MGMT has followed a very '90s career arc. Stop me if you've heard this one before: Weird band scores some fluke hits (in this case, the 2008 smashes "Time to Pretend," "Electric Feel," and "Kids"); weird band follows those hits with even weirder albums (2010's "Congratulations" and 2013's "MGMT"), making abundantly clear their utter disinterest in writing any future hits; casual fans lose interest, while the remaining faithful praise weird band's artistic integrity. It's a narrative admirably out of step with the aspirational nature of modern music culture, but at times it's felt like MGMT was overdoing it, smothering natural melodic gifts in self-consciously "difficult" psychedelic affectations as if afraid they might accidentally write a catchy pop song again.
Opinion: Great
MGMT's "Little Dark Age" (Columbia) is being hyped as a "return to form," but that's misleading. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden never aimed to become pop stars, though for a brief moment they became ones anyway. While attending college in Connecticut in the early 2000s, they bonded over their fondness for sarcasm and synthesizers. Signed to a major-label deal as MGMT, the duo crafted a debut album, "Oracular Spectacular," that boasted a handful of surprising electro-pop hits: "Time to Pretend," "Electric Feel," "Kids." Suddenly MGMT was a festival act with a million-plus-selling album.
Opinion: Great
MGMT's "Little Dark Age" (Columbia) is being hyped as a "return to form," but that's misleading. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden never aimed to become pop stars, though for a brief moment they became ones anyway. While attending college in Connecticut in the early 2000s, they bonded over their fondness for sarcasm and synthesizers. Signed to a major-label deal as MGMT, the duo crafted a debut album, "Oracular Spectacular," that boasted a handful of surprising electro-pop hits: "Time to Pretend," "Electric Feel," "Kids." Suddenly MGMT was a festival act with a million-plus-selling album.
'Little Dark Age'
is available now