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**MGMT - MGMT**
★★★★☆

By 2013, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser had painted themselves into a particularly psychedelic corner. After the meteoric success of 2007's *Oracular Spectacular* turned them into unlikely pop stars – complete with festival headlining slots and omnipresent radio play courtesy of "Electric Feel" and "Kids" – the duo spent their follow-up, 2010's *Congratulations*, systematically dismantling their commercial appeal. Where most bands might have doubled down on the formula that made them rich, MGMT seemed determined to alienate anyone who'd discovered them through a mobile phone advert.

Their third album, the self-titled *MGMT*, finds the Brooklyn-via-Connecticut duo pushing even further into the experimental wilderness, crafting what amounts to a fever dream of kaleidoscopic pop that sounds like The Beach Boys collaborating with Can while suffering from severe food poisoning. It's an album that demands patience, rewards curiosity, and occasionally tests the limits of both.

Musically, *MGMT* exists in a realm somewhere between neo-psychedelia and avant-garde pop, though such labels feel inadequate when confronted with the album's shape-shifting nature. The record opens with "Alien Days," a seven-minute odyssey that begins with what sounds like a malfunctioning carnival ride before morphing into a surprisingly tender meditation on existential dread. VanWyngarden's vocals float over layers of backwards guitars, analog synthesizers, and percussion that seems to have been recorded in a wind tunnel. It's simultaneously the most accessible and most challenging thing they'd recorded to date.

The album's centrepiece, "Your Life Is a Lie," showcases the band's newfound fascination with dissonance and space. Built around a hypnotic bass line and adorned with guitar textures that seem to breathe and pulse with organic life, it's a track that reveals new details with each listen. Goldwasser's production work here is particularly noteworthy – every element exists in its own sonic ecosystem, yet somehow coheres into something resembling a pop song.

"Cool Song No. 2" might be the closest thing to a conventional MGMT track, if conventional MGMT tracks typically featured lyrics about "riding the snake to the lake" over music that sounds like early Pink Floyd remixed by Aphex Twin. The song's central hook is genuinely infectious, buried though it may be beneath layers of studio trickery and deliberate obfuscation.

The album's most successful experiment comes with "Mystery Disease," a track that marries the duo's pop instincts with their experimental impulses more successfully than anything else in their catalogue. The song builds from a simple drum machine pattern into a towering wall of sound that somehow maintains its melodic centre throughout. It's the sound of a band finally learning how to be weird and catchy simultaneously.

Less successful is "I Love You Too, Death," which, despite its provocative title, meanders through nine minutes of ambient noodling that feels more like an endurance test than a song. Similarly, "Plenty of Girls in the Sea" drowns its promising central idea in effects and studio manipulation to the point where the original song becomes almost irrelevant.

The album's production, handled largely by the band themselves with assistance from Dave Fridmann, deserves particular praise. Every track exists in its own sonic universe, yet the album maintains a cohesive aesthetic throughout. The use of space and silence is particularly effective – these songs breathe in ways that much contemporary music does not.

*MGMT* represents a fascinating paradox: an album that's simultaneously the band's most accomplished work and their most difficult. It's a record that rewards active listening while punishing casual consumption, demanding attention while offering genuine rewards for those willing to meet it on its own terms.

In the decade since its release, *MGMT* has slowly revealed itself as something of a minor masterpiece – a bold artistic statement that prioritises creative growth over commercial considerations. While it may never achieve the cultural penetration of *Oracular Spectacular*, it stands as perhaps the clearest expression of what MGMT actually are when freed from expectations and commercial pressure.

For a band that began as a college joke, *MGMT* represents their full transformation into serious artists – even if they're still not entirely sure what that means.