MGMT - Is Oracular Spectacular? Not All Of It

Oracular Spectacular is the début album by MGMT, a two-piece band from New York. They play what you could broadly call indy-rock, but with strong 60s influences, and picking up splashes of 80s electro-pop and 1990s British psychedelia on the 40 year journey to our MP3 players. The first half is really good, but the second half is rubbish, so that it seems like two EPs by two bands, the latter a parody of the former, but without the money for as good a producer (Dave Fridmann, most notably producer for The Flaming Lips.) Either that or they just ran out of good songs. The first 5 tracks are poppy, sometimes danceable, sometimes solemn. Either way, they are all well written songs with a great mix of instruments and electronic sounds to support the vocals. The whole CD has intelligently written lyrics, and the lyrical ideas fit well with the vibe of the songs, so that they don't come across as pretentious or atry-farty, or being clever songs for the sake of writing clever songs. Tracks like the big single "Time To Pretend" and "The Youth" are anarchic teenage anthems of anti-establishment rebellion, ghosts of the 1960s, resurrected along with the music and the 3 minute LSD trips that they call music videos. And as alternative as band members and self proclaimed fans of paganism Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, purport to be, even they can't resist writing at least one song about girls, giving us the token romance of "Electric Feel."

As you would perhaps expect from a band of this size, most of the tracks are carried by very prominent bass-lines, to a backing chorus of everything from organs and pianos to gongs and a horribly intrusive hand-drum opening (can anyone say Doggy Bounce?) to "4th Dimensional Transition," which also marks the start of the inferior part of the album. Probably the only other instrument to feature on every other track, the vocals lend themselves well to the more up tempo songs with more layers, where they blend into the well constructed mix of synth , bass and electronic jiggery-pokery, but the lead singer (who knows which one of them it is) copes less well with slower, more minimal numbers at the back of the CD, and his voice is exposed as dreary and droning, especially when it is on its own without the backing of the other band member. The bass too, starts to sound oppressive and sluggish, with the occasional frill thrown in, seemingly more for the sake of it than for any musical merit.

The only two stand out tracks for me are, no surprise, the first two singles. The aforementioned "Time To Pretend," which featured in that Kevin Spacey film about card counting "21" (which was pretty good, btw) and "Electric Feel" are the best examples of the well constructed, multi-layered tracks that I was talking about before, and if as much time had been put in to some of the latter tracks this could be a brilliant album, but it has been released before it was ready. I don't know who decided on the release date, but someone needs to have a word with the management.

Rudolph Percy Lafferty - Part II

It was a thursday. The name for thursday, the fourth day in the week in the ISO 8601 calender, is derived from the Germanic equivalent of the Latin Iovis Dies, meaning "Jupiter's Day." Jupiter is the largest of the 8 planets that orbit the star Sol, and features heavily, along with the other earlier discovered planets, in the mythology and religion of early civilisations on the planet Earth. To Rudy though, this information was largely insignificant. More importantly to him, since finishing school, it had become an unwritten rule that every Thursday he and his friends would go to the "student night" at one of Wolverhampton's numerous nightclubs. Nightclubs all over the country had recently been seizing on the desire under-18 year olds had for buying alcohol, despite the law of the UK (aka Britain) forbidding it, and had set up "student nights" seemingly for that purpose. Even so, the doorstaff at these establishments had to at least appear to be trying to enforce the age limit, so for Rudy and his friends, all under 18, thursday had become synonymous with a trip to The Crypt, but also with coming up with ever more ingenius ways to fool the bouncers into thinking they were 18. Rudy had up until this week been successful using his older brother Simon's driving lisence, to whom he bore a striking resemblence.

This story blows. I give up.

Rudolph Percy Lafferty

I'm going to write a story.

Many of you will have heard of a planet called Earth. It's a pretty small planet, as planets go, but its just far away enough from the star it goes round for people to get a tan when they go on holiday. As a result, its quite a popular place to live and there about 6 billion people on it at the time of writing. That would be alright, but everyone chooses to live really close to each other and leave the majority of the planet uninhabitited. This makes things pretty crowded, but makes for some pretty interesting social situations, which is great for people who like that sort of thing.
One person who did like that sort of thing was called Rudy. He lived in a thing called a city, which was just a name given to any relatively large gathering of people all living in buildings built very close to each other. Other characteristics of a city are that they are more or less self contained, so that all the people who live in one rarely have to leave it, so long as the industry folk kept up a sufficent daily stream of food and medical supplies. This particular city was called Wolverhampton, and it was in a country called the United Kingdom, somewhere between the equator and the northern most pole of the planet. The reasons for the strange name of this country are a long and tedious tale which we will not go into here.
So Rudy from Wolverhampton was a 17 year old male of the genus homo sapien. His given name was Rudolph Percy Lafferty, but he thought that was a bit of a stupid name, so he told everyone he met to call him Rudy. Only his grandmother on his father's side, Margret Lafferty, still called him Rudolph, and no one ever bothered with the Percy. It makes you wonder why his parents bothered. So Rudy had finished school (a compulsory system of education emposed on children in the United Kingdom and most other countries of the planet) a year ago, and was mind-way through his A Levels (a 2 year academic qualification.) The story you are about to read recounts the somewhat remarkable events of the intervening summer. If you are using this document as a historical reference, don't for a moment imagine that the events described are typical of a teenager in Britain (aka the United Kingdom) during this period. Sure, every teenager has his or her fair share of drama, but the specific goings on vary depending on the individuals interests, upbringing and personality. With that in mind, we shall embark on our story...