The Beat Surrender

MGMT produced one of my favourite albums of this year with Oracular Spectacular, so to say that I was really desperate to get to this gig was an understatement. It had sold out well in advance, so again I was relying on one of my fantastic PR contacts to come up trumps and he didn’t let me down.

Onwards to the show and we met up inside with a mate who had bought a ticket, all three of us were really looking forward to this gig, with little sign of the split decision that was to follow later on, this was bound to be good right…yep we were unanimous, it just had all the makings of being a classic gig.

Things got off to a less than impressive start with the support act Florence & The Machine, a band that features a female lead singer, no problem in that, except she was basically wailing! Now the last time I saw something like that was old footage on TV of some of the old hippies in the summer of love era, where anything went musically as they were all off their tits on acid.

We retired to the bar in the middle room, as at least that put a fairly solid wall between her and us. After a relatively short period though MGMT were on stage and pleasingly they were joined by a band to help flesh out their sound. That had been a worry for me how two people were going to recreate the album.

The very oddly dressed duo and their accompanying band members get off to a good start, four tracks from the album and they sound pretty good, the vocals did start off a little bit iffy, but a minute in and they were soon sorted out once levels had been adjusted.

Problems start part way into the set though for me. I know the album has a definite prog influence, but that has been fantastically reigned in by the producer, to leave a psychedelic pop album in the main. Live though they seem to have decided that it’s their party and they’ll prog if they want to, prog if they want to.

The end result is that what could have been an excellent set, ends up being, dull, drawn out (well over an hour) and laboured to the point that I was bored rigid by the end. This wasn’t helped by the fact that one of the songs lasted for over 15 minutes. Now in my eyes that is just self indulgent and putting aside the whole point of a gig, which is to entertain a crowd.

Although this is all very disappointing, the biggest let down of the night is their most well known and popular song to date. Time To Pretend is a brilliant single, but live it sounds lumpen, tinny and a far cry from the glorious track that it is on record.

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