“Nothing Changes” is one of about four power ballads out there Loss of life, depending on the expansiveness of your definition. That might not seem like much for a 10-song album. But the spirit of the power ballad, its search for a tempo slow enough and a full drumbeat huge enough to capture the entire human heart, permeates this music, even when not explicitly invoked. The form's free blending of sincerity and artifice seems to appeal to MGMT on a literary or cinematic level, just as a particular composition or color palette might appeal to a novelist or filmmaker for the way they portray the psychological states of their characters. But we tend to value pop music, more than other media, based on this binary evaluation of emotion. And jamming so many long, slow songs together risks making us feel a little bored. By the time of “I Wish I Was Joking,” the penultimate song and final power ballad, you may have crossed a threshold in your willingness to appreciate the music mentally and feel it in general. Although it does feature some genuinely funny lyrics that get a laugh – the conversational honesty of 'Here's the thing about drugs' as the first line of a verse. the allusive particularity of 'Noone calls me the gangster of love' as an entry on the next cons list – the melody just isn't strong enough to support the charming melodrama of its arrangement, however cleverly it conveys the narcissistic bath of addiction.
It is indicative of this intensity that the strongest person follows Loss of life they are those that escape the strict adherence to its general strange atmosphere. 'Nothing to Declare', a wistful psych-folk travelogue, and 'Bubblegum Dog', a candy-coated glam rocker, could fit as album tracks on Congratulations the Oracular Spectacular. Although they may not add that much to the feel of it Loss of life As a unified aesthetic statement on their own, they're just good songs, and seem more likely than the epic “Dancing in Babylon” or “People in the Streets” to end up in fans' regular rotation.
And then there's the album-closing title track, which charts strange new territory not only for MGMT, but in a small sense, for pop itself. I've never heard anything quite like the mix of frozen electronics, 'Penny Lane' brass band fanfare and demented dancing pizzicato strings. At the climax—why not?—a bruising spasm of IDM comes in like an unexpected thunderclap, almost drowning out the rest. It's like hyperpop if you combined the immediacy of internet-era hyperpop with MGMT's long-standing curiosity about record label flotsam from decades before the first file backups of this little genre. It feels, in some oblique way, like the inevitable end of all those huge drum fills and syrupy synth pads, the apocalyptic transcendence they've always pointed to, recognized as such only by the moment of its arrival. It is, in other words, the perfect thematic conclusion to an imperfect album. And more to the point, simply hits.
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