Late Night Tales: MGMT (2LP + CD)

Format: 2x12" 180 gram vinyl + CD and Booklet.

Formed in 2002 in Brooklyn, New York, the band is comprised of multi-instrumentalists Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, both alumni of Wesleyan University. Their 2008 debut album, Oracular Spectacular, spawned the almost omnipresent singles Kids, Time To Pretend and Electric Feel, whilst its 2010 follow-up, Congratulations, showcased a more progressive bent, with a more guitar-oriented sound.

The band’s Late Night Tales selection, spanning post-punk, cult indie, and counter-culture figures, reflects their multifaceted sound and draws parallels with contemporary dreampop, chillwave, shoegaze, and folk scenes on both sides of the Atlantic.

The listener finds MGMT presiding over the after-after party playlist, with the day's early light seeping through the curtains sooner than desired, strewn, undone bodies in the hallways, and emotionally vacant souls held together by timeless songs of heartbreak and longing.

Luminaries such as The Velvet Underground, Suicide, and Julian Cope — though not with their best-known tracks — sit alongside less familiar names such as Disco Inferno, whose track Can’t See It Through, taken from their 1996 swansong album Technicolour, opens the session.

MGMT’s exclusive cover of Bauhaus’s All We Ever Wanted Was Everything sits perfectly alongside artists contemporaneous to the UK post-punk-goth band such as The Durutti Column, The Chills, The Jacobites, and Felt’s brief but mighty instrumental Red Indians.

Paranoia runs deep: the pairing of Cheval Sombre’s Troubled Mind and 60s Christian folk singer Dave Bixby’s Drug Song undercuts the hope offered by the ever-penitent Spacemen 3 (MGMT’s second album, Congratulations, was recorded with their founder Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom), who perform Lord Can You Hear Me?, paying homage to the beautiful closer Morning Splendor, taken from Pauline Anna Strom’s rare 1982 LP, Trans-Millenia Consort.