Recap MGMT at the Riverside Theater

Earlier this year, MGMT released its conceptually challenging sophomore effort, Congratulations, which attempted to move the massively popular electro-pop duo in a darker, weirder, less club-friendly direction. It was an admirable gamble, but a gamble nonetheless, and one that clearly hasn’t paid off with a sizeable portion of MGMT's fan base. For a youngish crowd sold on dance-oriented hits like “Time To Pretend,” “Electric Feel,” and the ubiquitous radio staple “Kids” from 2007’s Oracular Spectacular, Sunday night’s sold-out show at the Riverside Theater had long stretches where nobody seemed quite sure what to do with their glow sticks.

For anyone not overly attached to MGMT’s best-known songs, the show proved a winning showcase for the band’s upbeat, large-scale psychedelia. Through the use of elaborate box and wave-shaped screens the back of the stage, the band synced songs to mini-light shows, as well as images of trippy and complex patterns, and surreal videos of dancing robot men eating light bulbs or floating electrified heads. During the standout track “Brian Eno” from Congratulations, there was even a black-and-white photo of Eno for all the kids out there who had no clue that he exists outside the MGMT song.

MGMT didn’t get around to “Kids” until the encore, and the performance proved simultaneously rousing and anti-climatic. The band returned to the stage with openers Tame Impala and danced around while founders Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden sang, karaoke-style, to a pre-recorded instrumental track. It garnered the biggest response of the night, even if it felt perfunctory and frustratingly tossed-off.

At least the shift in performance style on “Kids” cleared up an issue with VanWyngarden’s vocals, which were muddy and hard to hear when the band was playing at full volume. Whether the issue was technical or due to vocal effects employed by the band, it was definitely detrimental to MGMT’s playful lyrical witticisms. 

Overall, the juxtaposition of songs like the trippy, mellow instrumental track “Lady Dada’s Nightmare” with exuberant dance tracks from the first album left the mood somewhere between anticipatory and gratifying, though newer songs like “Brian Eno,” and “It’s Working” that appeared later in the set did seem to win over the crowd.

The night ended with MGMT playing the beautiful “Congratulations” and exiting as silhouettes against the bright lights glowing from the screens at the back of the stage. The serenity of the song was the perfect way to end a night that lived somewhere between a schizophrenic art-rock show and would-be dance party.