In other March news, Kajsa gave me a really good new tape
called “Arctic Vortex”—made, it seems, in mid-February, back when winter seemed
like it would never leave. I’ve had the tape since early March and one of the
first songs to impress itself on me, on there, is today’s song.
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| VanWynGarden, Goldwasser |
The only song by MGMT I knew previously was the wry and
catchy and funny “Time to Pretend,” which I also have on a tape from Kajsa.
These guys, Andrew VanWynGarden and Ben Goldwasser, were in college when she was, graduating a few years after, and they
went to school up the road there at Wesleyan. Let’s hear it for CT! If either of
them took a big lecture course on Shakespeare while enrolled there, it’s
possible I graded his work.
Anyway, I knew “Time to Pretend” but never heard the rest of
the album, Oracular Spectacular. The
song seemed to me like almost a novelty song. The kind of thing that comes along,
gets a chuckle and, y’know, so what. Figured they'd be out of the picture in no
time, even though that album had great sales. Guess you could say I was
considering them “flash in the pan” material.
Well, no. Today’s song is from their second album, Congratulations, which came out in 2010.
So I’m already three years behind. It’s OK, I’m used to it. Anyway, this album
seemed not to be as deliriously received by their legions of fans, or whatever
a rock critic is supposed to say. Who cares? This song, with its hypnotic,
low-key sound and that weird falsetto vocal, crept into my consciousness, and then
it gets a big pop lift at the end, but in a way that doesn’t sound derivative
or anything, rather it’s like, OK, this is what pop sounds like now. Or rather,
then. On the strength of my curiosity about this song I went out and got their
latest album, MGMT, which came out last September, and also Congratulations.
So now I guess I’m a fan. I can’t say I’ve “fully absorbed”
either of the albums, but the third one seems to be starting to win out. And
yet. This song is still my favorite at the moment.
I’m drawn in by the deliberate pace and the way Andrew VanWynGarden,
singing lead, enunciates lines like “In the long hall pipes are glistening /
Blues prepared for anti-christening.” Whatever that means—I suppose we could
say it means you’re about to lose your identity rather than gain it. Tone-poem-wise
it’s a pretty trippy lyric—“To mirror teeth where neon lures troll”—that seems
to go along with a state of some kind of psychic distress. It’s to be assumed
that the “someone” missing is likely to be the speaker himself, where “someone’s
telling the toll to me”—the first line—suggests a sort of cautionary spiel
about the risks of, as the Dormouse would say, feeding your head.
What the song probably reminds me of is the feeling of
anticipation, waiting for the psychedelics to kick in. That gradual but
relentless flow toward the big crescendo where it all becomes, so to speak,
parti-colored, but still in that same lockstep. “And what’s extinct might come
alive / A purple smoke in some internal shrine.” Yeah, maybe, but it might also just become
still more extinct. And that’s the risk you take. Stoking the internal shrine
seems like a good idea though, so, go with it.
The song doesn’t really take us outside that state of
apprehension but through repetition the idea that “it feels like someone’s
missing” comes to seem celebratory. Hurrah, I’m not here. A consummation
devoutly to be wished.
When I heard the song first and through many other
listenings, in the context of the tape, it was much more somber than it seems
on its own. The song fits the mood of these days where it’s not just a feeling
but a fact that someone’s missing, and always will be, from now on.
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