MGMT

Little Dark Age

Little Dark Age is audibly more rooted in mainstream mid-80s electronic pop than anything MGMT have recorded before.

Little Dark Age was met with little anticipation or excitement, but the music gives the impression that the two have transcended their concern with status or influence.

MGMT are back to their roots on Little Dark Age, with concise tunes built from cushy keyboard beats and cute, kiting melodies.

The good news is that Little Dark Age marks a welcome shift in tactics. Much of the belabored excess of the last two albums is gone. They have traded the shaggy 1960s references and overstuffed arrangements for comparatively streamlined pop, and they have rediscovered their ability to write hooks.

For better or worse, Little Dark Age is an album for its time: moody, backward-looking, a little depressed.

It is, in some ways, an auditory microcosm of the band's career up until this point. Its first half features some of the group's sweetest pop confections since those massive singles, while its second delves into the muggy Barrett-isms of their more recent work.

tle Dark Age, the duo’s long-gestating fourth album, casts them as graveyard goths whose madcap sense of humor barely keeps the bad vibes at bay. That it works is a testament to just how unpredictable this band has become in its experimental period.

The record is entertaining with a drastic switch to a toe-tapping twinkly 80’s-inspired synth pop and yet at the same meaningful and relevant, which is something their antecedent fans connected with on debut Oracular Spectacular.

There are some sweet moments on Little Dark Age and some stale ones. More often than not, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser lapse back into a sardonic mode that sounded a whole lot better in 2007 than it does in 2018.