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.