One of the most obvious signs of the onset of old age in your average music fan appears to be the annual comparison of albums bought versus album included in the music media’s end of year polls.  Whereas through your late-teens and throughout your twenties a ‘score’ of ten, twelve or maybe even a fifteen from a typical top 50 albums of the year list can be consistently achieved in any year, terminal decline sets in through your thirties until you are struggling to get more than one or two albums on any publication’s list that you have added to your collection during the year. 

MGMT have been a constant fixture on most of the 2008 end of year album polls I’ve seen, and whilst I haven’t gotten around to buying ‘Oracular Spectacular‘, it feels like I don’t even have to as it’s been an omnipresent soundtrack to the year, inescapable any time you turned on the radio, switched on the TV or went out to the shops.

Whilst the album has been garnering the rave reviews and end of year accolades, the live experience seems to be a lot more of a mixed bag, with as many, if not more, bad reviews as good reviews, and their Brisbane show at The Tivoli was no exception. Whilst I only got to see the first three songs before I was escorted out (I also disappointingly didn’t get to photograph the support acts – Tame Impala and Luke Steele) it was three songs of extreme soporific tendencies, with all the electro-psychedelic-pop charm of the album sucked out and replaced by a dirge of self-indulgent, bad prog-rock guitar noodling. And for once I know that it’s just not me: the reviews and comments from other shows they have recently played in Sydney and at Meredith, together with the reviews from the Brisbane show, all seem to be somewhat less than flattering, and it’s a rare occasion when me and the Courier Mail agree on something…

A few more photos on flickr.

Footnote: BTW, the only album I’ve bought this year that most publications have included in the upper echelons of their respective best album polls is ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!’ by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. Feel free to suggest anything from 2008 that I might like, a thankless task I’m sure… So long as no one recommends Vampire Weekend we’ll probably be ok…  Or at least off to a good start…