MGMT – Your Life Is A Lie
The confounding US psych-pop duo unsettle with first vid from album three.
Oh man. Thanks, guys. Dispense with the sweet Turtles pop harmonies and hone in on the chant-chorus and the first bulletin from Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser’s third album as MGMT could be some disorientating repetitive utterance from such counter-cultural acid tricksters as The Fugs or The Mothers Of Invention: “Here’s the deal / Open your eyes / Your life is a lie.”
Mmm... OK.
The video, conceived in the award-winning damaged brain of Tom Kuntz (who also created this sad desert epic for the group), is a rapid-cut-run through dispiriting metaphors of pointlessness (dead-eyed office parties, a disemboweled teddy-bear, Whac–A–Mole), with many of the video characters played by burnt-out hippies.
It ain't a lot of laughs.
But keep watching. In the end it gets kinda hypnotic and liberating, and there is a singular godless positivity in there (“You will survive / All on your own”), while the sweetness of those harmonies feels like a nod to late-era Monkees, when they sang who-cares smash-the-system ditties like this.
So make your choice, and we'll rejoice in never being free. And don't forget to have a nice day.