Little Dark Age MGMT

• 1She Works Out Too Much04:38
• 2Little Dark Age04:59
• 3When You Die04:23
• 4Me and Michael04:49
• 5TSLAMP04:30
• 6James03:52
• 7Days That Got Away04:44
• 8One Thing Left to Try04:20
• 9When You're Small03:30
• 10Hand It Over04:18
• Total Runtime44:03

Info for Little Dark Age

Little Dark Age was produced by MGMT, Patrick Wimberly (Chairlift, Kelela, Blood Orange), and long-time collaborator Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Spoon, Tame Impala). MGMT recorded Little Dark Age at Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, NY. The album includes the previously released title song "Little Dark Age," and the tracks "When You Die" and "Hand It Over." Formed in 2002 by Andrew VanWyngarden (lead vocals, guitar, keyboard, bass guitar, drums, percussion) and Ben Goldwasser (vocals, keyboards, guitar, percussion), MGMT released their influential, Grammy-nominated, debut album Oracular Spectacular in 2007. This was followed by 2010's Congratulations and 2013's self-titled album MGMT.

"Most of MGMT’s career has been spent living in the shadow of their breakthrough debut album, Oracular Spectacular. Its many singles crashed mainstream rock radio back in 2008, and they’ve essentially never left—and it’s not so difficult to understand why. “Time to Pretend” and “Electric Feel” are psychedelic pop written for massive stadiums and sporting events. They’re weird, certainly, but weird in a way that just about anyone can get in on the ground floor. Whereas their follow-up releases, 2010’s Congratulations and 2013’s self-titled release, felt more like grab bags of various styles and approaches that, while well executed, never quite recaptured the euphoric feeling of their debut.

Little Dark Age, the band’s fourth album, was preceded by the longest between-album pause in the psych-pop group’s career, and the work they’ve put into it shows. It once again features longtime collaborator and producer Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips), as well as co-producer Patrick Wimberly (Chairlift, Blood Orange), and though it’s not necessarily the same blockbuster pop record that their debut was, it’s easily their most interesting record in a decade.

With the woozy synthesizers and disorienting narration of leadoff track “She Works Out Too Much,” Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser seem to be guiding the listener into a peculiar, Black Mirror-style version of a pop record. It’s elaborate, overwhelming and will inevitably lead to sensory overload. The message is clear: This is a big album.

The album earns its outsized ambition through some genuinely excellent songs, however. The title track is a dramatic synth-pop song that seems to split the difference between goth and ‘80s funk, while the dreamy closer “Hand It Over” is one of the prettiest songs the band has written. Yet “Me and Michael,” which has yet to be released as a single, is the track that feels most like a long-lost ‘80s gem. There’s still so much going on that Little Dark Age is a lot to take in, but it’s worth going back for seconds."

MGMT

MGMT
(pronounced "Management") are a genre-bending psychedelic synth-pop duo from New York. After the release of their debut album, Oracular Spectacular, MGMT's profile swiftly rose. They have toured with Of Montreal and Yeasayer, and are frequently compared to Beck.

Background: Though they hail from the hipster neighborhood of Williamsburg in New York’s Brooklyn borough, MGMT was born —under the name The Management— in rural Connecticut, on the hallowed campus of Wesleyan University where the art-student pair happened to live down-the-hall from each other in the same dormitory.

"There wasn’t a point where we were like ‘hey, I like you, I like your style, let's start a band!’" Goldwasser says, of the beginnings of their collaborative relationship. "It just came from us hanging out, messing around, making songs. After a while, we had two or three songs, and then it was four, and then at some point we just kind of realized we had a band. Without ever actually deciding to form a band."

Beginnings: Working from a record collection that included The Flaming Lips, Royal Trux, Suicide, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Prince, Pavement, and Neil Young, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser started out making rote replications of cuts they loved.

"A lot of our songs, especially when we were just starting out, we were trying to create a song in a certain genre; we never wanted to have a single sound, crank out a bunch of songs that all sounded the same," recounts Goldwasser. "All of our songs felt like experiments, but, eventually, all those experiments started to blur together, and as we got better at songwriting, we started writing things that just sounded like us."

MGMT began as a recording project, the duo working on many songs that would show up, recurringly, on both their 2005 debut EP Time to Pretend and Oracular Spectacular. When they started to play live, The Management were pretty much a goof-off.

"It started out as a complete joke," confesses Goldwasser. "We'd play shows, but usually our shows were just the two of us singing along with an iPod. We weren't playing instruments, it was more of a spectacle than an actual live concert. People didn't know whether to take it as a complete joke or not. It was kind of funny seeing how other people would try and gauge their reactions by us; like, they seemed like they were trying to work out whether we took ourselves seriously or not. It left people feeling very confused. That's something that we’ve always enjoyed doing: confusing people."

Breakout: After self-releasing their Time to Pretend EP, and touring with Of Montreal, the band signed to Columbia Records and set about recording their debut album with Dave Fridmann, the longtime Flaming Lips producer. MGMT released their debut album, Oracular Spectacular in digital format, in October 2007, three months ahead of the album's physical release. Mixing up a variety of genres, the album introduced MGMT as a jokey band of no fixed style.

"I don’t feel like we play a particular style of music at all, so in that way it feels like we’re quite isolated," says Goldwasser. "I wouldn’t know where to begin in describing our music, so, without that, it’s hard to work out what bands might sound like us."

Since the release of Oracular Spectacular, which peaked at #60 on the Billboard chart, MGMT have achieved considerable commercial success abroad. Both the album and the single "Electric Feel" charted in the Australian Top 10 and the UK Top 20.

In 2010, MGMT released their second album, Congratulations. Produced by Pete 'Sonic Boom' Kember of Spacemen 3 and featuring guest vocals from Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux, the album was released without any accompanying singles. Tending towards madcap arrangements and an experimental, hectic approach, the band posited it as a more accurate representation of MGMT.

"We dropped any sort of irony that was on the first record, and Congratulations feels true to who we really are," VanWyngarden told Spin.

This album contains no booklet.