MGMT

While the album feels daring all the way through, early tracks like "Alien Days" feel relatively straightforward, mining the ornate pop sound of their previous effort.

Beyond weird? Yes, but in the best, most deliciously mind-bending of ways. [Oct 2013, p.88]

MGMT haven't necessarily re-discovered their mojo, but re-imagined it, and in doing so, may well have given us one of the best albums of the year.

Though it features no straightforward pop songs, MGMT finds VanWyngarden and Goldwasser having a great deal of fun creating exactly the kind of eclectic, weird music they want to.

This is an album hard to grasp at first, let alone on second or third listens.

The cosmic expanses of "I Love You Too, Death" and "Astro-Mancy" are particularly engrossing, but this record boasts more than enough quality head trips to keep you in it pull 'til the next go-round. [No. 103, p.57]

MGMT seem to have settled into their groove here, or more correctly their two concurrent grooves. On one hand, they seem able to produce easily digestible fuzzy pop songs slightly reminiscent of soft rock with what appears to be consummate ease; on the other, they can enter into all manner of sonic digressions with a noteworthy lightness of touch.

MGMT might be an uncomfortable journey at times, but it’s also a transcendental one you’ve never been on before.

In other words, it’s not MGMT vs. Oracular Spectacular; if anything’s holding MGMT back, it’s themselves.

They're doubling down on that sound [mad-hatter psychedelic sprawl of 2010's winkingly titled Congratulations] for Album Three, pushing their love of acid-tinged bubblegum right out the back door of the booby hatch, in a good way.

You might need a strong cuppa to settle your nerves afterwards.

Something’s always looming and buzzing--or burbling, or clattering, or tapping, or ratcheting, or blipping, or quavering--near the foreground throughout MGMT’s third album, MGMT. It makes the album both testing and, eventually, rewarding.

The pair unleash a succession of hallucinatory soundscapes that feel hermetically sealed yet confrontational, as if daring us to fire up a fat blunt and allow this sleek beast to burrow into our frontal lobes. [Oct 2013, p.71]