Wine and Cheese: MGMT and Red Vox
While many know MGMT from their big hits, not as many have heard of Red Vox. Both bands have catalogues full of energetic, intricately crafted, introspective, and outstanding music in a vast array of musical styles. While their particular styles may differ, their music still feels the same at the core.
It’s your dream collab. The artists you add back-to-back to the queue. The pairing you can’t get enough of. You know they sound good together, but why? Welcome to Wine and Cheese, a series investigating the why and telling you all about it.
Written by Haley Kennis
Photos courtesy of Consequence of Sound and Last.fm
If you already love psychedelic indie pop rock band MGMT, alternative indie rock band Red Vox may be your next love. MGMT exploded onto the music scene in the mid-2000s with their iconic hits “Kids,” “Time to Pretend,” and, of course, “Electric Feel.” Red Vox is a small, independent band from Staten Island, New York that formed in 2015 from a fairly unlikely source: video game streaming. While the bands may not sound extremely similar at first, digging deeper into their music reveals many elements that make each band feel like one side of the same musical coin.
MGMT was formed by friends Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser in their freshman year of college. The band initially went by the name The Management as a satirical take on the music industry, and Andrew tried to write what he thought were the most typical-sounding pop songs he could imagine. Ironically, he did that a little too well, as those songs would become their massive debut singles and score them a record deal at Columbia Records. The band has since gone on to make four studio records: the genre-defining Oracular Spectacular, the divisive yet retrospectively praised Congratulations, the even more controversial and heavily psychedelic MGMT, and their most recent return to form and dive into gothic pop Little Dark Age. The band’s unique electronic sound continues to run through their music, but they have delved into many other genres during their career like psychedelic guitar lead rock, full-blown psychedelia, and synthpop.
Red Vox originates from a similar place as MGMT. Two friends, Vinny and Mike, made music for years before in their old band Davy’s Grey and a few at-home solo projects. But Red Vox itself came to be in 2015, with two more of their friends completing the band. Lead singer, guitarist, and lyricist Vinny is most known as popular variety video game streamer and YouTuber Vinesauce, and drummer and lyricist Mike is also a Twitch streamer under the name Jabroni Mike. Separate from their usual comedy (for the most part), Red Vox is a serious passion project that has since released three studio albums and one EP: their energetic and promising debut What Could Go Wrong, their hard rock gross-out humor EP Blood Bagel, the atmospheric and thoughtful Another Light, and the heartbreaking but beautiful acoustic album Kerosene. Their fourth studio album, Realign, is set to release in early 2020 and will feature more synthesizers than their past releases, as the band stated in a YouTube comment on their most recent single, “Why Can’t This Be Easy.”
Photos courtesy of Columbia Records and Bandcamp
While Red Vox leans more to the rock side of alternative and MGMT to the pop side, all of their songs are densely crafted with tons of atmosphere and personality. MGMT’s “Brian Eno” and Red Vox’s “Job in the City” are filled to the brim with energy and fly by at breakneck speeds. The beloved MGMT song “Kids” and the newest Red Vox song “Why Can’t This Be Easy” both feature similar tight drum grooves, buzzy psychedelic synths, and crunchy distorted bass. But both band’s slower, quiet songs are just as powerful as their fast-paced songs. Congratulations by MGMT and Red Vox’s album Kerosene are contemplative, somber, and resigned, but also contain a lot of lush atmospheric sounds in their backdrops. These examples only scratch the surface of the different sounds both bands have covered, as each group evolves their sounds into something completely new with each album they release.
\Both Andrew and Vinny have distinctly different voices, but listening to them both back-to-back shows how their contrast works in harmony. Andrew’s bright, unusual, and extremely expressive voice adds a lot to the unique psychedelic tone of MGMT songs, highlighted especially on songs like “One Thing Left to Try” and “Future Reflections.” Vinny’s voice is expressive on the lower side — his deep and pleasing voice always matches the power of Red Vox instrumentals, whether he is singing gently on “Heavy Little Heart” or nearly growling on “Reno” and "Atom Bomb." Both of them also have impressive falsettos that add so much color to songs like “In the Garden” by Red Vox and “Someone’s Missing” by MGMT.
Most similarly, MGMT and Red Vox cover a lot of the same ground in their lyrics. Both bands have contemplated death (“When You Die,” “From the Stars”), memory and the passage of time (“Days That Got Away,” “Memento Mori,” “Memories Lie”), self-doubt and depression (“Little Dark Age,” “One Thing Left to Try,” “Hazy,” “Foot in the Door”), the effects of modern technology (“TSLAMP,” “Ghost Page”), and many other introspective, difficult topics you wouldn’t usually want to think about. They both show a surprising amount of vulnerability and maturity while covering these subjects as well, making them both cathartic to listen to.
Both of the bands’ best songs are their multi-section rock epics. MGMT’s “Siberian Breaks” clocks in at a whopping 12 minutes and nine seconds, but it never feels that long. The different musical sections are like several airy tunes flowing together seamlessly underneath VanWyngarden’s cryptic lyrics about losing one’s sense of self and escapism. Red Vox’s “Stranded” is a 9 minute and 14 second mini-space rock opera about being abandoned in space and left to contemplate the meaning of life and death. The song begins with a quiet, warm groove which explodes into the hard rock chorus, followed by a mournful bridge which explodes again into a cosmic jam session, before fading away into the acoustic guitar and dark bass. Both songs tackle feelings of existential dread in unique ways that showcase the bands’ special musical and lyrical talents.
While MGMT and Red Vox mostly make serious, thoughtful lyrics, they aren’t always that serious. In 2016, Red Vox released a short EP called Blood Bagel, five songs worth of gross-out humor about different bodily functions. Don’t get it twisted, though — the lyrics are supposed to make you laugh and cringe, but the music itself slaps just as much as the rest of their songs. MGMT also have a sense of humor, especially in the breakup song “She Works Out Too Much,” where the entire song is a play on words about exercise: “the only reason we never worked out/was he didn’t work out,” and the satirical take on the destructive lifestyle of rock takes center stage in “Time to Pretend.” Given both of their different comedic beginnings, it isn’t surprising to see some comedy in their music. Even if that humor isn’t in the vast majority of their music, it lends a little bit of lightness to the dark topics they take on.
Red Vox and MGMT are great examples of creative and thoughtful alternative rock artists both inside and outside of the mainstream. If you are in the mood for some incessantly catchy tunes to have an existential crisis to while dancing, headbanging, or both — Red Vox and MGMT are the bands for you.