Ever since moving to the land of never ending drama involving football players with strange, frenchy last names I've been mildly impressed with the quality of the radio stations here. There are at least three stations that don't make me want to cry with their repetitive playlists and poorly concealed editorial allegiances to the corporate powers-that-be, which is three more than most other places I've lived.
But my most favorite radio station 102.1 disappointed me this week. They have a nightly "cage match" between new songs, asking listeners to call in and vote for which song they like more. There are several problems with this style of polling, but it's not at all uncommon in radio, so I just have to grin and bear it. No, my problem is not that respondents are self-selected by their availability and access to phones. Nor is it that the quality of a song can rarely, if ever, be ascertained in one listening (and over such a low-fidelity device as an FM radio). No, my problem is that when the radio station tells me they have a new song I expect it to be NEW.
My knuckles turned white and my eyes got all squinty as I heard the radio DJ announce that the contender in the cage match would be none other than MGMT. The song, sadly, was not a new single, not even the now-available single off their forthcoming album. It was Time To Pretend off of their first album and that also appears on the 21 soundtrack.
On the plus side, the song rocks and I enjoyed myself. If you haven't listened to MGMT, check out this quote from their official site about the band's beginnings:
Andrew and Ben began staging a series of "these obnoxious, noisy live electronic shows -- we never planned on having it be a recorded project -- where we would write these weird techno loops and arrangements that we could play with live. Most of it was running live off the computer and we had a turntable plugged into some guitar pedals, a radio, and a tape player. It was all electronically generated at that point. We would write a new song for each show and our shows would be 15 minutes long."
MGMT is currently on tour with Beck. (this is erroneous - see the anonymous contributor's comment)
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2 comments:
Actually MGMT's headed to Japan, then to Europe for a couple weeks. They don't go on tour with Beck til September. Check out their myspace for the schedule.
Ah, sweet. Thanks for the correction.
Actually, I've been to their fan site and to their myspace page, but both sites have the signature ugliness that so many cool bands are employing nowadays (even radiohead). I think you have to be below some certain threshold age to be able to look at such websites for any extended period of time without weeping uncontrollably.
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