CD Review: REVIEWED: Title: “Oracular Spectacular” l Artist: MGMT l Label: Red Ink/Columbia, 2007

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

By Ben Cannon

Part of what I am really enjoying about K-HOL, the valley’s new community radio station, is that it is already beginning to put some of the excitement and mystery of good programming back onto the local airwaves.

By my reckoning, one of the real pleasures of good radio is not listening to some recent or vintage ‘hit’ song, but is more often in those moments when you hear some strange new song for the first time and, and if the conditions are right and you are lucky enough to catch it again, it grabs you by the nape of your neck.

While I did not discover the band MGMT on the radio they, too, are involved in what I believe are these really smart, innovative and, yes, fun times for contemporary music (much of what I’m alluding to is could loosely be called “indie,” or some derivative thereof).

On MGMT’s debut album, Oracular Spectacular, Brooklyn art-punk duo Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden, who formed the group while studying at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University, bridge rock and electronica to capture a full, driving sound. The result is a great first album that, in turns, is wonderfully vapid but at other moments tugs more thoughtfully at some deeper truths.

The album’s opening track, “Time to Pretend,” is a catchy tongue-in-cheek treatment of the desires of two young men to lead the archetypal rockstar lifestyle – an existence replete with models, drugs, jet-setting and, inevitably, an early burn out.
My favorite song on the album is “Electric Feel,” a lively disco tune sung falsetto that soars with the lyrics “All along the western front.” But then, I can never resist a dance track that evokes the First World War.

“Kids,” which dispenses life advice – “Control yourself/take only what you need from it” – has a new-wave-meets-the-Killers vibe, with a bouncing synthesizer breakdown.  
MGMT recorded the album with producer Dave Fridmann, the man behind some of the quasi avant-garde Flaming Lips’ best work. And, like one of the celebrated Flaming Lips albums such as, say, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, MGMT manages in one album to cover a lot of ground. And that, taken as a whole, equals a considerable thesis about what is new and possible in music today.

Not only do these guys make good music, they embrace a live performance and music video aesthetic that keeps things interesting. They have toured with Of Montreal, a thoroughly weird Athens, Ga., that makes some undeniably catchy music. In a sense the two bands are connected through an ascendant artistic sensibility that extends beyond simply writing and recording songs. I like that some of the new promising voices in music have these visions and aspirations; and the sounds are sublime.

Courtesy Oracular Spectacular
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CD Review: REVIEWED: Title: “Oracular Spectacular” l Artist: MGMT l Label: Red Ink/Columbia, 2007 | Planet JH News Article: General Music Arts and Culture

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