POP/ROCK
MGMT, "Little Dark Age" (Columbia)
After two albums of willfully experimental psychedelic pop, MGMT return to writing the type of hooks they proved so skilled at on their debut, 2007's "Oracular Spectacular." Musically, "Little Dark Age" draws a lot on '80s synth-based commercial pop, such as Hall & Oates, Madonna and Eurythmics, with lots of slightly cheesy backing vocals. But there's more going on than those period references: MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser again worked with Dave Fridmann, the frequent Flaming Lips producer, so these songs are dense with sonic details that are fun to parse.
It's a jokey, satiric album, with songs about being tethered to social media ("She Works Out Too Much") and devices ("TSLAMP," which stands for "time spent looking at my phone") in addition to ones about politics ("Hand It Over") and friendships ("Me and Michael"). But in scoffing and cursing at the modern world's superficialities, they tend to undermine the depth of the songs themselves.
STEVE KLINGE, Philadelphia Inquirer
Laurie Anderson, "Landfall" (Nonesuch)
Nearly everyone who lived through superstorm Sandy in 2012 has a story to tell about it. Anderson enlisted the Kronos Quartet and set hers to music.
"Landfall" started as a performance piece, but it holds together as an album as well, though visuals probably enhanced the more expository pieces like "The Electricity Goes Out and We Move to a Hotel."
The 70-minute piece runs from the start of the storm, which Anderson weathered in Lower Manhattan with her husband, the late Lou Reed, through its aftermath, with the foreboding sounds of helicopters marking the transition.
