by BrainBurner
Every few years, a musician achieves that rare combination of commercial dominance and critical acclaim — and therefore inspires lots of copycats — only to willfully retreat from the spotlight. This usually involves making an album designed to alienate mainstream audiences and/or distance the originator from the imitators. It also tends to create a vacuum into which those imitators can leap, allowing them to bask in commercial success for a while until everyone stops searching for “the new _____.” Nirvana and Pearl Jam attempted this maneuver in 1993 with the abrasive In Utero and the video-free Vs. respectively, clearing the way for Stone Temple Pilots, Live, and Bush to satiate the public’s bubblegrunge hunger. When Radiohead famously muffled Thom Yorke’s heavenly falsetto and handcuffed Jonny Greenwood’s spastic six-string theatrics on 2000′s Kid A, the world had no shortage of potential “new Radioheads” to choose from. And when constant hitmaker Kanye West flipped the digital middle finger that was Yeezus last year, urban radio programmers found workable substitutes in Yeezy facsimiles such as Big Sean and J. Cole.MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular was the sort of world-conquering unanimous favorite you rarely see anymore, an album that crossed over from alt-rock channels to produce three inescapable pop hits, each of which also cracked the Pazz & Jop critics’ poll’s top 50. (The album itself finished in the critics’ top 20.) MGMT’s psych-tinged dance-pop was everywhere — on the radio, at dance parties, in seemingly every ad on TV. But when the duo decided to muffle its formidable pop powers on 2010 follow-up Congratulations in favor of an insular psych and post-punk odyssey, there was an opportunity for MGMT clones to run rampant on the pop charts. Some of them (Empire Of The Sun) were more palatable than others (Capital Cities). Some (STRFKR) took over for MGMT in the TV sync department but couldn’t replicate their chart success; others (Portugal. The Man) broke at alternative radio but couldn’t crack the top 40. You could make a good case that Oracular Spectacular paved the way for the embrace of Passion Pit and Vampire Weekend beyond their original niche audience. But no one seized the post-MGMT moment quite like Foster The People.