The first words on Brooklyn based duo MGMT's debut
Oracular Spectacular could be accidentally construed as their mission statement. After a watery experimental prelude, a catchy keys riff chimes out, a drum fill and 'Time to Pretend' kicks in triumphantly with "
I'm feeling rough I'm feeling raw in the prime of my life / Let's make some music make some money find some models for wives". Married to the overdriven synth and a lazy disco beat it's about as chin-up and fist-pumping as pop music gets. Except our narrator, Andrew VanWyngarden, goes on to mock the bedroom band dream of hitting the big time and all the trappings - and inevitable cliches - it entails. "
We'll choke on our vomit, that will be the end / We're fated to pretend". It's a glorious signifier and a singular tongue in cheek masterstroke for VanWyngarden and partner, keyboard player Ben Goldwasser, dismissing any naysayers while clearing a path into the very world of superstardom they mock.
Despite being just a precocious two-piece (but 6-piece live band) MGMT draw comparisons with The Arcade Fire and The Flaming Lips for all their "reach for the stars" grandeur, especially so to the latter with their frequent trippy interludes and spaced out production. But MGMTs trick is to marry those modern lessons and indie-rock signposts with retro stylings. Hints of psychedelic 60s and 70s kids like Love, Pink Floyd and even The Rolling Stones provide a framework - see high straining slow burner 'Pieces of What' and the 'Paint it Black' echo-ing 'Weekend Wars' - that the band filters through far-fetched production, obtuse lyrics and broken synths. But it's never used to look back. Rather it conjures up a new, futuristic world. Truth is MGMT aren't genre-hoppers, as much as squeezing things out through their own third-eye.
The left-turns begin with second track 'Weekend Wars' starting on flat, tinny production over a finger picked acoustic, before bottoming out into arpeggio chimes and a falsetto sung lyric describing an anarchic metropolis. From there it picks up pace and finishes like a finale from
Hair : The Musical. 'The Youth' slows things down a bit with it's ghostly and self-reflecting
"the youth are starting to change / are you starting to change?" baritone backing vocals, before 'Electric Feel' offers up a Prince-lite funk jam complete with the flutes stolen from Men at Work's 'Down Under' (the
video of which has some amazing comparisons to MGMT's video for
'Time to Pretend'; both displaced characters lost in the desert and a strange miasma of band caricature and surrealism).
From there, second great single 'Kids' arrives, following the same template as 'Time to Pretend'; a distorted mid-tempo beat over descending synth washes and a chiming key run over the top. But again, think widescreen, not club. It opens up the second half of the record, which bar the indulgent miss-step of '4th Dimensional Transition', harbours the darker, fantasy heart behind the shiny preen of the first. VanWyngarden talks of "burying all the pieces / falling from the sky / pieces of what / pieces of what we used to call home"", before concluding on album closer "Future Reflections" with "and remember what it felt like / to be alone / sitting in the sunlight / all alone".
Tales of moving through forests, faceless tribes, a "street missing a building so the kids had something to do" and that "we couldn't use computers anymore", all conspire to illustrate a narrator out of step with, but searching for, a reality. As well as the "man succumbing to nature" ethic that Grandaddy explored so constantly. Perhaps as the refrain of "We got the handshake under out tongue" at the end of 'The Handshake' spells out, these kids are searching beyond the fashionistas and loin-rush of one night stands, concerning themselves with the Why? The Who? The What If? Or at least, fantastically, the theatre of it.
Oracular Spectacular is all those things debuts from upstarts very rarely are. Assured, complex and arguably, ahead of its time. Recorded with famed producer Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mogwai, Sleater Kinney) the band have endured a rocky relationship with the indie media after signing a six-figure, four-album record deal with a major label, and then being dogged by poor live reviews and blogger backlash. I don't buy it. They shouldn't be concerned. Because finally and importantly, the band provide the way out of the New Wave bog so many are currently treading in, with nothing more than a sometimes flawed but unique, pop classic.