Live Review

MGMT – Academy 2, Manchester

• 23rd May 2008

When it was announced that Academy 2 were to host MGMT, there was the impression that it had secured some kind of coup. It’s no wonder; MGMT are another New York band to be lauded as ‘the next big thing’, promising to bring psychedelic indie and irresistible harmonies to their audiences, so the anticipation was partly justified.

The reality? Dull. Too simple a term, maybe, but no word has been more accurate to describe a band on a particular night before. Ever.
Achingly baby-faced singer Andrew Vanwyngarden looked every bit the American rock star, complete with headband and tie-dyed low cut shirt. This should have been the first sign that the evening was going to be one of no-nonsense anthem rock.

After a five minute, slow guitar rift introduction, you got the sense that this gig should have been played in a stadium; not because the band stood a chance of filling such a venue, but because the tracks would be more suited to an audience of generic-looking soft-rock fans, all lolling their heads in an 80s fashion.

As it stood, the audience was seemingly unimpressed by what they were witnessing, aside from the first two rows, who’d obviously taken the band, or copious amounts of discounted beer, to their hearts, freely using classic rock hand salutes with no sense of irony.

The majority of tracks, taken from their debut album ‘Oracular Spectacular’ including ‘Weekend Wars’ and ‘Pieces of What’, were not concluded to much applause. There’s no doubting that MGMT are musicians. The reservations come when people suggest they are performers. It turns out you can’t trust people. Aside from the odd bark of ‘next!’ from Vanwyngarden, merely signalling another track, there is very little interaction with the audience; it was a night where a break would have been more than welcome.

The domination of guitars in their live sound, rather than the keyboard and sequencers that seem to control their recorded versions, mean that the highs are not quite high enough. They almost made it on a couple of occasions with ‘Electric Feel’, but they need to strongly think about abandoning their continuous guitar onslaught and swapping it for some of the multi- dimensional sound that we hear on record.
Unsurprisingly, ‘Time to Pretend’, was received more warmly than the rest of the set, but it did not halt the obligatory exodus after its completion.

The final track before an assumed encore was a cover of The Kinks ‘Mindless Child of Motherhood’; not that I was much of a witness to it, for I prefer memories of The Kinks to remain untarnished.

MGMT work as a team. They can play instruments. They carry tie-dye well. But if you’re looking for technicolor psychedelic indie, try elsewhere.