Mgmt

Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden were a couple of college freshman when they first crossed paths in 2002. The two music majors from Wesleyan University, the private liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut, quickly discovered they had a lot in common. For starters, they shared a passion for mystic paganism. They agreed that a joke could not only be funny, but sad and profound too. And they both loved psychotropic sounds.

So Goldwasser and VanWyngarden started hanging out, talking music, and goofing around with electronica. As a thesis project, these performance art provocateurs decided to stage a series of on-campus shows that were conceived as 15-minute-long experiments in noise rock. Intentionally obnoxious, the electronic shows included weird loops and arrangements the duo played live via computer, radio, tape player, and a turntable plugged into some guitar pedals. They performed one song per show, and wrote a new song for each show, a practice that allowed them to continuously explore new methods of musical composition. According to VanWyngarden, "Some songs we wrote just because we wanted to learn how to be really bad within a certain genre and then people started liking the song because they liked the genre. It was an accident that people started liking us." Never did the two young men entertain the idea of recording the project. "We weren't trying to start a band," says Goldwasser. But by the time they graduated Wesleyan in 2005, Goldwasser and VanWyngarden, with an EP and a demo album under their belts and a second EP set to drop, had done precisely that.

They initially called themselves The Management, but were forced to change the name to MGMT when The Management was already being used by another band. Their first release as MGMT was the 6-song EP Time to Pretend, which dropped in August 2005. The single "Time to Pretend" from the EP was later re-recorded for inclusion on the band's major label debut album and has appeared on television shows like 90210, The Vampire Diaries, and Gossip Girl. More recently, director Tim Burton featured the song while showing a teaser of his upcoming film, Alice in Wonderland, at the 2009 Comic-Con.

After the release of the Time to Pretend EP, Goldwasser and VanWyngarden hit the road with a drummer for a couple months. "We'd written these weird California Creedence Clearwater-style songs in two weeks," says VanWyngarden. "We went out, played them, and never did the songs again. A lot of people hated it. That used to be the goal of our shows." After the brief tour, the duo went on hiatus. VanWyngarden moved to Brooklyn, New York, for a post-college "existential crisis" while Goldwasser hung out in Connecticut awhile before heading to upstate New York to work woodland construction.

The pair eventually reconvened in Brooklyn and began recording new material. They were signed to Columbia Records in autumn 2006 and cut their debut album, Oracular Spectacular, with The Flaming Lips' producer Dave Fridmann. The album wove together elements of various musical genres including psychedelic rock and synth-pop and fantasized the whole rock 'n' roll lifestyle, complete with drugs and model wives. Like a couple of synth-hippies, Goldwasser and VanWyngarden released musical hypotheticals into the cosmos, musings about coping with a fame they'd yet to achieve that, ironically enough, was to become a self-fulfilling prophecy with the success of the album.

Oracular Spectacular, released digitally in 2007 and on CD and LP formats in January 2008, landed at #12 on the UK album charts and #1 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart and has sold over 1 million copies worldwide to date. In 2009 Rolling Stone Magazine named it the 18th Best Album of the Decade, while the UK's NME chose it as the best album of 2008. Oracular Spectacular also earned MGMT a couple Grammy nominations.

Multi-instrumentalists Goldwasser (vocals, keyboards, synthesizer, drums) and VanWyngarden (vocals, guitar, keyboards, drums) put together a touring band to take Spectacular out on the road. The band included Matthew Asti (bass), James Richardson (drums), and Hank Sullivan (guitar). When Sullivan left the group in 2008, he was replaced by Will Berman, who joined MGMT as their new drummer, while James Richardson switched from drums to guitar.

In the year that followed the release of Oracular Spectacular, MGMT collaborated with several artists, among them The Flaming Lips on the track "Worm Mountain" from that band's 2009 release, Embryonic. They opened for Radiohead, Beck, Jane's Addiction and Sir Paul McCartney, himself an admitted fan, and headlined some gigs in the UK. Goldwasser and VanWyngarden basked in their newfound fame. They partied like the very rock stars they'd written about, racking up experiences that have provided them plenty of fodder for their latest release, Congratulations, which dropped this past Tuesday.

MGMT stretch out on their sophomore effort, trying to wrap their heads around what all has gone down and what comes next. Goldwasser and VanWyngarden state that they weren't trying to make an album about fame and success but realized it was inevitable as excess is all they've been living for over a year now.

When Congratulations was leaked on the web back in March, the band made the album available for fans to stream from the MGMT website. It has been reported that MGMT are not releasing singles in an effort to have Congratulations considered as a body of work and not a series of hits and fillers. In a recent review of the album, Rolling Stone awarded it three stars, calling Congratulations "a solid start" for a band trying to figure out how to keep their particular brand of weirdness relevant for the long haul.

You can catch MGMT live as they kick off an extensive tour that begins on April 17th with a performance at the annual Coachella Festival in Indio, California. MGMT will be out on the road stumping for Congratulations through year's end, at least. The band will be headlining music festivals from New Jersey's Bamboozle, to Washington state's Sasquatch, to Chicago’s Lollapalooza extravaganza in August where they'll share a stage with Green Day, the red hot Lady Gaga, and a recently reunited Soundgarden no less.

MGMT are scheduled to perform on Saturday Night Live on April 24th. They'll also be promoting their new album on the Late Show With David Letterman on May 11th. Check out their website at www.whoismgmt.com/us for details and tour dates.