Heralds of neo-psychedelia, the members of the duo MGMT (Andrew VanWyngarden, Benjamin Goldwasser) temper their ardor on this surprising fifth album of their career, whose title suggests a more sober atmosphere than that of the previous one. Little Dark Age (2018). The vintage synths seem to have taken the edge, as we only notice them on the second listen: there to discreetly accompany the ballad People in the Streets, there to provoke some harmonic bursts on the soft rock refrain Nothing to Declare or to color the vaporous Phradie’s And Loss of Life at the end of the album. Melancholy and introspection are the order of the day for this album where the musicians emphasize the work of composition, inherited from the pop and rock of the 1970s, in a sometimes post-Beatlesque style making us discover a facet of MGMT once hidden in its epic psyche-prog flights. Christine and the Queens come to sing a duet with VanWyngarden on the deliciously unsettling Dancing in Babylon.
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