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- Critic score
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- By date
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Q MagazineJan 27, 2014These ever-changing moods don't make MGMT an easy listen. [Oct 2013, p.105]
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MojoSep 19, 2013Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser's third album again fails to provide a soft pop landing. [Oct 2013, p.96]
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Sep 19, 2013On its own merits, it's a decent enough record with some interesting tracks on it, even if they sometimes sound like nicely turned B-sides rather than top drawer material.
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Sep 17, 2013Occasionally the band’s vision pays off here.
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Sep 17, 2013The tenacity of it all is admirable. But the result, a self-titled rebirth following a hiatus, is a bit of a mess. Still, it’s a thrillingly inventive and uncompromisingly colorful mess, and isn’t that the best kind of mess?
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Sep 16, 2013It sometimes meanders like a wasted hipster at an Animal Collective after-show. Yet it preserves enough presence of mind to yield gems such as the sing-song "Alien Days" or the deliquescent "Mystery Disease."
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Sep 12, 2013Considering it’s only 44 minutes long, MGMT’s self-titled third album feels much lengthier. This is partly due to the dense layers and constantly shifting textures, but it’s also a result of the abrasive digital distortion shrouding the psych-pop jams, making it a tiring listen even at its most melodic.
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Sep 23, 2013If the rest of the album were as strong as those three songs ["A Good Sadness," "Astro-Mancy," and "I Love You Too, Death], this would be a masterpiece and a powerful growth for the band. As it stands, they can at best serve as a taste of what's to come.
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Nov 7, 2013MGMT's still reacting to the mainstream triumph of 2008's Oracular Spectacular, trying too hard to sound genuinely weird, as if determined to fail at any cost.
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Sep 23, 2013It quickly veers into a curious stream of whim with their most alienating, and unfortunately, their most characterless yet--they deliver an onslaught of acrimonious synths in the post-apocalyptic, jazz-tinged Mystery Disease, while Cool Song No. 2 shamelessly takes a page out of the Can playbook with its grimy, overcompressed effects.
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Sep 16, 2013Their reach is admirable, but their grasp is often too weak to truly pull off their ambitions.
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Sep 16, 2013An impenetrable, overwrought, hit-and-miss product marred by ego.
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Sep 10, 2013Dense, uneasy psychedelia dominates, and although this isn’t a product of wilfully inaccessible experimentation, neither does it contain much in the way of instant melodies and conventional song structures.
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Entertainment WeeklySep 18, 2013Their cavalcade of goopy dross and hippie-dippy navel-gazing takes a left at transcendence and eventually just lets this bloated trip sputter out altogether. [20/27 Sep 2013, p.152]
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Sep 19, 2013MGMT is by some margin the New Yorker’s most intuitive, sincere and naturalistic record. The bad news is that it’s not at all musically interesting.
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Sep 17, 2013MGMT chokes on its own forced sense of whimsy.
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Sep 16, 2013The swampy, claustrophobic MGMT is never as interesting or smart as the crowd-pleasing sing-alongs on Oracular Spectacular.
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Sep 16, 2013None of the other songs are as instantly arresting, aside from “Plenty of Girls in the Sea,” which proves to be just as fruitless and repetitive as the aforementioned single.
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Sep 13, 2013Another dilettante excursion with little to recommend it. [The Independent scored this a 2/5 in the actual printed edition not 5/5 as seen on its online edition]
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Sep 10, 2013A confused, confusing album, MGMT treats contemporaneity as if it were an insulin shot.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 69 out of 119
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Mixed: 31 out of 119
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Negative: 19 out of 119
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Sep 18, 2013
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Sep 17, 2013
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Sep 17, 2013