For a young band with superstar status and a hot first album there’s no less enviable task than recording a second one. Fans want another catchy blockbuster they can sing in the shower, critics want a challenging new effort that shows artistic progression. What they get is sometimes a little of both, but mostly a lot of neither. Hence: the “sophomore slump.”
For Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, the curly-haired heartthrobs of Brooklyn synthpop act MGMT, sophomore year couldn’t have looked more daunting. The duo’s 2008 debut, Oracular Spectacular, went platinum, garnering red carpet photo shoots, a Grammy nomination and tours with Radiohead thanks to infectious hits like “Electric Feel,” “Kids” and “Time to Pretend.” And after a liquor-soaked tour that earned VanWyngarden a reputation as a Mötley Crüe-caliber party animal, the band had all the ingredients for a one-hit-wonder pie.
Those apprehensions—while not utterly dashed—were certainly softened when Congratulations, MGMT’s freshly released L.P., turned out to be a curve ball, breaking high and away from the pure synthpop strike zone that led to their walk-off homerun in 2008 and toward something deeper, more heady and honest. Santa Cruz Weekly caught up the ever-shirtless VanWyngarden ahead of MGMT’s giddily anticipated and extremely sold out May 29 concert at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.
“I don’t know if we were naïve. But we had no idea how things worked when we signed to Columbia,” says the 27-year-old Wesleyan grad and unwitting creator of the headband fad. “All of a sudden we found ourselves on the road for 15 months. That whole process forced us to grow up a little bit.”
With newfound maturity, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser have removed tongues from cheeks that, on Oracular, teased about finding models for wives and living fast and dying young. Instead, Congratulations finds two young men less concerned with pointing out the irony in becoming famous artists and more concerned with making art. The change might seem natural and even welcome. Yet critical opinions of the album range from the sacred (Mojo: “a reinvention so fully realized it could almost be the work of another band”) to the profane (The Independent: “Andrew, congratulations indeed. You’ve made a record only a handful of people are going to enjoy. What do you want? A chocolate watch?”) And fans seem bitterly divided as well, with some feverishly loyal and others shocked and dismayed. VanWyngarden says he never set out to zig when folks expected a zag, he just wanted to write new songs.
“I think Ben and I both feel that this album is not that huge of a departure from our last album. We’ve never thought of MGMT as having a certain one sound,” he says. “We knew some people would be confused by (the new album), but that’s not really our problem. We’re just making whatever music we want.”
It would likely interest Santa Cruzans that when he gets in town, VanWyngarden says he’ll have his surfboard and wetsuit in tow. Though a fairly new hobby, SC’s signature sport has become a minor obsession for the New Yorker, the results of which first leaked into the psychedelic music video for Oracular’s “Time to Pretend.” On the new disc, surfing takes a front seat as a major theme, from the cover art, which features a fox-shaped wave devouring a surfing cartoon creature to the 10-minute epic acoustic track “Siberian Breaks.”
“Even in the first record I was thinking and dreaming about surfing,” says VanWyngarden. “I finally got to start surfing in Australia maybe a year and a half ago, then when we were in Malibu recording the album I tried to go out every day. It’s just something that I love to do and I think about a lot. On “Siberian Breaks,” I was watching a video of these guys, they were surfing in Russia or something, the water was freezing and it jut kind of inspired me. Hopefully I’ll get to surf in Santa Cruz. Steamer Lane is the famous one, right? I don’t know if I’d actually surf there, but just to go down and watch would be cool.”
Don’t count on all the poppy hits of yesteryear to find their way to this weekend’s setlist either, as the group has been avoiding favorites like “Kids” at recent shows such as April’s Coachella performance. Do, however, count on a slightly older, fractionally more sober and hugely more polished indie heartthrob duo to man the synth rock wheel.
“I think the new album is a reflection of just how confused we were,” he says. “We took a little bit of a risk doing it, but the payoff would be, hopefully, a career where we can do whatever we want now. I think the sophomore album thing can feel like a lose-lose situation. If we wrote an album that sounded like the first one people would jump on that and call us lazy, or something. I think we did a good job in sticking to what we wanted to make this time.”
MGMT shocks like electric eels Saturday, May 29 at 8pm at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, 307 Church Street, Santa Cruz. Tickets are sold out, but as of Monday, were still available on Ebay for around $90 apiece.
