Life after irony

Indie pop five-piece MGMT released their new album Congratulations this week, which they say is a complete departure from their earlier sing-along sound. Photo / Supplied

They didn't really mean to, but MGMT appealed to the OMG generation when they released their catchy (or grating, depending on your taste) single Kids in 2007.

Its simple chorus - "Control yourself/ Take only what you need from it/ A family of trees wantin'/ To be haunted" - was repeated seven times in the tune. And about a million times on radio.

So it's no wonder bloggers turned slanderous when they found out the band's new album was devoid of any catchy singalongs.

"I think a lot of people felt a sort of knee-jerk negative reaction to it because it's not what they were expecting. There's been some discouraging bad stuff but there's also a lot of positives," says one part of the lead pair, Ben Goldwasser, speaking to TimeOut from Sydney.

He and the band - who now call themselves a five-piece rather than a Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden duo-plus-band - were on a quick whip-around-the-world promotional tour before playing at Californian music festival Coachella this weekend.

Their sophomore album, Congratulations, was officially released this week, which would have tied in well with their performance to the masses at the festival, but the nine songs were somehow poured all over the internet three weeks ago.

"Yeah, kinda sucks," Goldwasser says of the leak. "On the positive side, we are playing these shows now and if the album hadn't leaked we'd be playing completely new material that people had never heard before. It's cool, people are already singing along with some of the new songs when we play live."

Yes, fans have found a way to sing along to the screeds of long-winded poetry that are part of MGMT's reinvention, Goldwasser says.

"We played a show last night here and there were definitely some people who knew all of the words and were singing along the whole time so, it's pretty cool. I dunno, for us it's not that weird to have a thing without an obvious chorus. But I suppose a lot of people think of us as a pop band and most pop band's music has choruses. Some people are angry at us for making songs without choruses."

What spurred this change of tack? Was it a pivotal event, a tragedy, a push from the label?

Goldwasser says it was more about the band trying to be true to themselves after being swept up in "the whole promotional machine" of the last album.

The band had barely left college - Wesleyan University in Connecticut, a liberal artsy place that Santogold and the Dresden Dolls also attended - when they were signed, produced their debut Oracular Spectacular and were suddenly performing wild shows all around the world and climbing the polls to NME best album of 2008.

MGMT have said in the past they were taking the mickey out of their psychedelic pop songs, which included lyrics such as "Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives" in Time To Pretend. Goldwasser explains that when he and VanWyngarden were in college and playing to about 30 people, they played up pop diva personalities.

"It was ironic, and you know, irony is really cool when you are in college. But we are playing in front of big crowds now and if we were ironically acting like pop stars on stage it wouldn't come across as ironic, it would be arrogant. We had to kind of rethink that whole thing," he says.

Now that they are not in the business of trying to get signed and pass out demos, MGMT are taking their music more seriously, Goldwasser says. But he wouldn't go as far as saying they are a serious band.

"There are a lot of bands that are way too serious but also we don't want to be seen as some ironic sort of joke band. I think we would hate ourselves if we had to go through life doing something that we thought was a joke. Having to do that constantly would get pretty irritating."

They never play Kids, a song they wrote during their "ironic" college days, among themselves - but they do throw it out as a crowd pleaser at gigs.

"When we started the band, we would play karaoke-style shows with everyone singing along to the music and Kids was always the first or second song we played. It doesn't really fit in with the rest of the stuff that we are doing and it probably never will but I dunno, it's still fun to perform for people." The stuff they are doing now includes a morbid video for new apocalyptic track, Flash Delirium, featuring a bunch of dead-pan old people pulling an eel from a slit in Goldwasser's throat.

"Yeah, it's disgusting," says Goldwasser. "I think [the actors] were kind of bemused by the whole thing but I think they were a little bit weirded out."

Goldwasser says he and VanWyngarden were a bit confused about how they started being accepted on a mainstream pop level.

"Not that it's a bad thing at all, but it's never something we were trying to do. We are really just kind of shy people who don't have that persona at all."

Their song Congratulations contains the lyrics "I've got someone to make reports that tell me how my money's spent, to book my stays and draw my blinds so I can't see what's really there, and all I need's a big congratulations", alluding to the lack of control they felt when they were plunged head-first into the pop-idol scene.

But Goldwasser says by naming their second album Congratulations before they had even released their first, MGMT knew they were on a path to something they would be genuinely proud of.

"We were a little bit nervous. Not about the reaction but whether we could actually be true to ourselves after being lost in the whole promotional machine and having so much stuff thrown at us that we were totally unaccustomed to.

"I think we struggled at first to get back to basics and focus on music that made us happy. In the end, looking back on it we are really proud of the album. It feels like an accurate representation of ourselves musically. We are super happy."

LOWDOWN

Who: MGMT
What: New York indie five-piece best known for hits Kids, Electric Feel, Time to Pretend.
Latest: Sophomore album Congratulations, released by Sony this week