What was mgmt first album

He seems to be wearing almost exactly the same clothes as Colonel Tom Parker in the famous photo in which Elvis points a gun at him. The attention to detail extends to the trilby, which sits above the kind of face you automatically imagine with a cigar sticking out of.

At the centre of the room Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden sit, staring at a table groaning with food and drink. It is, they concede, all rather a long way from Wesleyan University, the famously liberal establishment labelled "the coolest college ever" by the US press, where MGMT began as a kind of LSD-inspired joke, taking the stage dressed as giant snowmen, playing the theme tune from Ghostbusters for 45 minutes, giving obnoxious interviews to the campus newspaper "bullshitting about all our groupies and drinking whiskey and playing Russia" and "trying to fuck with people by making the poppiest music imaginable, that we thought was really stupid".

Depending on your perspective, it all sounds either like iconoclastic fun or perfectly insufferable student wackiness of the look-at-this-picture-of-an-alien-saying-take-me-to-your-dealer school; either way, the band had more or less run its course when a major label heard an EP they had made 18 months previously, decided that the songs Goldwasser and VanWyngarden thought were really stupid weren't stupid at all, and signed them.

And all of a sudden that song was, like, a single, and we had to play it every day for … two … years. Now we're It's hard to keep that naiveyear-old-at-college philosophy going when you're writing a second album. You see what it can do to people. People strive for that, where everything is taken care of for you and you don't have to think for yourself at all. We got a glimpse of that and shrunk back.

We thought, hmmm, I dunno. Let's write a really weird album. They were part of a group of acts, which included Yeasayer, Passion Pit and Santogold, who went from Brooklyn warehouse infamy to suddenly proper on-David-Letterman famous. Along the way, they inspired a Gucci runway show and made hippy headbands a thing.

Behind the scenes, however, the relationship between the two members was of complementary opposites: the analytical Ben Goldwasser and the free-spirited Andrew VanWyngarden. Now, after years of being out of sync, the oscillations of culture are again lining up with MGMT.

And, crucially, the frosty relationship between band and audience has thawed. The body language is not overly moist.

VanWyngarden, hunched on his stool, occasionally chews on a cuticle as he mulls over a question. MGMT never had a chance to sell out because they arrived already bought-in. Instead, after finding success on their debut album, the band adhered to the opposite trope, burying their heads further into the sand in their pursuit of music so outwardly antagonistic as to dare listeners to continue riding the hype train.

Pulling a Pearl Jam, you could call it. But the extent to which MGMT struck universal adoration during their first go round is difficult to overstate. Which is why when they took an even more freewheeling, shaggy approach and began making actual psychedelic music, the masses dispersed, leaving behind a comparatively tiny hardcore fan base. In order to ensure the mainstream would not once again follow their tracks, MGMT began to wear aimlessness as a mission statement.

That reach towards something the duo considered more artistically honest left us instead with Congratulations and MGMT. At their best moments, which proved the two songwriters held considerable skill in crafting unique sounds and converging disparate genres, both albums still felt as though they were coming from a place of retaliation, rather than revelation.

Finding an unlikely middle point between Suicide 's hostile, proto-electro punk art noise and the sardonic, pop-friendly sound of the Flaming Lips , MGMT started as electroclash musical terrorists but quickly grew into an eclectic, brainy pop group with psychedelic overtones. The band was initially known as the Management, and its shows consisted mostly of backing tapes, synthesizers, and pre-recorded vocals playing as Goldwasser and Van Wyngarden engaged the audience in a manner somewhere between performance art and good old-fashioned punk hostility.

By their senior year, they had toned down considerably on-stage, and began augmenting their live sound with backing musicians. For their full-length debut, the duo partnered with producer Dave Fridmann and recorded Oracular Spectacular , a far more musically expansive album that was released digitally in late A traditional CD release followed in January , and Oracular Spectacular ultimately enjoyed both critical approval and commercial success, with the album selling over , copies in the U.

Released in , the record found them growing more ambitious and quirkily psychedelic, with a song dedicated to two of their heroes: Dan Treacy of Television Personalities and Brian Eno. The album debuted at number two on the U. Billboard chart and the band toured much of the year, while also appearing on TV and playing many festivals. The following year, the bandmembers dug deep into their record collections to curate an installment of the Late Night Tales mixtape series and began work on their third album with Dave Fridmann.