If someone has ever seen an MGMT music video, they know it’s a trippy experience even while completely sober. The band’s Wednesday concert at the Orpheum Theater went above and beyond their music videos, providing a colorful and loud combination of chill and heavy, electric music.
The opener, Kuroma, was less trippy than the headliner, but still just as pleasing to any stoners in the audience. The crowd responded well to Kuroma, but when MGMT came onstage, soaked in bright lights and rocking through electronic music, the crowd went wild, completely ready to dive into the band’s intersensory experience.
The theater was packed with college-aged students hoping to relive their teenage emo years when Oracular Spectacular came out and was heard everywhere—on the radio, in movies and at parties. Then there were the hipsters, much more interested in the chill music off of the band’s more experimental second album, Congratulations. There were plenty of people, too, who only attended to hear “Kids.”
The graphics during the concert were spectacularly trippy. These graphics started off with alien/bug-like images that gradually became distorted in colors and pixilation like something off of Windows ’99. Shapes appeared and distorted in ways that were unexplainable. Even though there were, at times, minutes of smooth guitar and drums with little sonic variation, the audience was completely entertained throughout by the graphics on the screen.
The band’s last two songs—“Electric Feel” and “Congratulations”—appeased everyone in the audience and demonstrated the contrast between their upbeat grooves and their smooth, laidback sounds. The crowd was hungry for more and urged an encore from the band. With a little encouragement from some dedicated fangirls in the balcony, the band obliged. And before the crowd knew it, the colorful, bizarre and completely chill concert was over.