MGMT, Yeasayer at Bowery Ballroom
from the Brooklyn Vegan post
Never before has psychedelica sounded so amazing. Mixing beauty with brute Yeasayer drove through their performance, mixing harmonies with heavy beats and drums. I was warned that I would be blown away by their performance, and I was.
It helped to have a good friend their with me.
MGMT was equally astounding. Listening to “Weekend Wars”, and falling in love with the Bowie/Bolan vocals of Andrew VanWyngarden, I was eager to see his performance on stage. The set was mostly songs from their debut Oracular Spectacular, and ended with the band departing and leaving Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser onstage to karaoke to “Kids”. Simply brilliant, but I assume was a familiar situation for those two:
(From their bio): 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.