MGMT: Oracular Spectacular Review

 

In college, my roommate was convinced that he had found the next big band in MGMT. They hadn't yet released their debut album, so he was listening to their singles on their website. I really wish he was right, or at least right for a longer period of time.

I can't say anyone aside from him would have predicted that some of the biggest songs on the radio that year would be from this seemingly drug induced fever dream of an album. Really, Kids is as crazy a song as anything on the album. And yet, as more than one music fanatic has mentioned, they seemed to know it, and started their career off with Fated to Pretend, a song that predicted their own destiny to live a life of fame and fortune, forced to act the part.

Bandcamp was kind of popular among some of my friends, and I dug a little bit into the website, trying to find something new and interesting. Much of this album feels like surfing that website, never quite knowing what you'll land on. Sometimes it lands on americana (Pieces of What), other times it feels like the snow on your old TV is entering your sinuses (Of Moons, Birds & Monsters), other times still it sounds like a college rave party, full of cheap keyboards and drum pads (Kids, Time to Pretend), there's even a trippy Barry White style thrown in (Electric Feel).

Really, this is the strength of the album. In order to sell their thesis of pretending, they had to keep coming up with new ideas from beginning to end. While there are obvious threads running throughout the album, from near zero distortion electric guitars, to the seesaw between a southwest twang and a saturated, no harmony vocal asthetic, they absolutely walked their talk.

Just about every effect button on their Casio was used. They had an ability to absorb musical styles and crush them together into songs that would feel at home on Kanye West albums or Jack White albums at the same time. It doesn't hurt that they also know to pull away from the energy from time to time with excellent tracks like Weekend Wars and The Handshake.

It's a little hard to really describe everything that is going on here. Honestly, I'm kind of glad that I'm doing a bad job of explaining it. The fun of the album is listening to its weird and wonderful journey. I'm sure you'll recognize a few of the songs, and if they turned you away, maybe listen to them again in the context of the album as a whole. You'll be hard pressed to find something that makes shallow, messy, poorly recorded songs sound so deep, crisp, and wonderfully handcrafted.

9.1/10









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