MGMT: Bringing Smooth Jazz To The Underground?

noah | September 9, 2008 12:00 pm

While I was in Los Angeles, a song that sounded like it had somehow escaped from the Muzak of the late ’70s, and subsequently been grunged up by being loose on the streets during the intervening 30 years, kept entering my field of hearing–on car radios, in-hotel Muzak, ambient music in restaurants. (Somehow it didn’t crack the playlist of the two Rite Aids I visited during my visit (I always forget something when I got away), but that could have been the timing.) The track was fine at first, and it slowly grew on me thanks to its sleazy end-of-the-night vibe; by day four, the thing was lodged in my brain, and I wasn’t really minding all that much. As it turned out, the track in question was not from some lost album from the ’70s, but rather “Electric Feel” by the commenter-section-igniting MGMT.

Go ahead and sputter about me not having heard them up until this point; I know, I know. But there are lots of other records out there, and only so much time. And either way, it’s kind of funny that the band that spawned said song is lighting up the Hipster Runoff set in the same era of the smooth-jazz format being completely decimated. Removing all the context from “Electric Feel”–the angry comments from the pool partiers, the tizzy that bloggers have gotten into, the remixes by people trying to hitch a wagon to their still-ascendant (?) star–it really does sound like it could nestle right in between “Piano In The Dark” and the extended remix of Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good.” Is this the new, smooth sound of young America? And was it inevitable, what with all the coke out there?

To be fair, MGMT does categorize themselves as “easy listening” on their MySpace page, so maybe they’re just waiting for all the smooth-jazz stations in the country to fade away, so they can franchise their sound into a low-power-FM empire that fills the need currently being experienced by many a car-service driver. Weirder things have happened, right?

MGMT- Electric Feel [Dailymotion]

Tags: