Mgmt - Oracular Spectacular
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CD Details
Artist: MgmtBrand: Columbia
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2008-01-22
Music Label: Sony
Product features:
- MGMT ORACULAR SPECTACULAR
- Time To Pretend
- Weekend Wars
- The Youth
- Electric Feel
- Kids
- 4th Dimensional Transition
- Pieces Of What
- Of Moons, Birds & Monsters
- The Handshake
- Future Reflections
Music reviews of Oracular Spectacular
Music Review: Shallow
Rating: 2 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
First of all, MGMT? Is that "Management?" "Meenage Gutant Minja Turtles?" "Mey Gight Me Tiants?" Beats the hell out of me, and their website ("whoismgmt") is no help, either.
The album title, well, seems to be communicating some sort of remarkable event involving an oracle, or one that is, by inference mystical and difficult to interpret. Me, I think they just thought it sounded clever, and it rhymed, too. The depth of this title was not reflected in the music.
And what is this ridiculous promise of "multi-dimensional vibrating Technicolor sounds?" That's a pretty tall order, and I took up the challenge. I listened, carefully, living with this release in the car for two straight weeks. I heard absolutely nothing that I would characterize as multi-dimensional. I'd reserve that for King Crimson's Beat or Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. And vibrating Technicolor sound? Well, I heard absolutely nothing that got me close to that. For me, I'd lavish this compliment on Andreas Vollenweider's White Winds or Mark Isham's brilliant, lavish themes for The Cooler.
The album art had me shaking my head before I even got the disc into the player. The front photo is the duo of VanWyngarden and Goldwasser at the beach, tricked out in face paint and tied-on rave-junk, right down to the pathetic lightsticks, bad hair, vacant stares, thin and on so self-importantly trendy (these are shots from the video). The back cover art has them and their art-cool friends throwing flares into the sea, and the inside art has these deeply self-affected artistes all painted, in a studio, setting fire...wait for it...to play money--whoa! I mean, puh-leeze. What a load of stereotypical art-poser glop. Strangely enough, the online art that is generated automatically for your ripped versions of this release is considerably different than that described above.
The website does tell me an awful lot more than the album does, either in the music itself, or in liner notes. The liner notes are a sad and sorry letdown. One side is a big spiral, like an old-timey, cheapo hypnotism prop, and the other side is a genuinely crappy, and ultimately obnoxious run of the songs' lyrics, with no song titles, just jumbled-up bunches of words, in someone's bad, tiny handwriting. Artist: if you're going to offer lyrics, making them legible is a good rule of thumb. What's offered is a condescending, cynical swipe at us as consumers of their product.
(Oh, and by the way, the website is a low-budget mess, pretending at some kind of post-pop art statement. The link to the merchandise works just fine, though.)
Ah, but these wild "mystic pagans," these Connecticut college boys are all about breaking rules, and, y'know, defying stuff, n' all. So where's that in this music? Oh yeah, the music. On almost all tracks, the voices are under and slightly behind the music, and that's because they can't sing. Although, from time to time, early Mick Jagger seems to be the vocal model, thin and pushed. That's an interesting vocal approach, but it does not fit in any way with the music they're making, and the low-rent artsy-techno vibe they are creating. The lyrics are trite and predictable, talking about living fast and dying young, getting jobs in offices, "the kids" this and "the kids" that, etc. No track did anything for me, and believe me, I gave this album plenty of time to grow on me, playing it in my car nonstop for two straight weeks. In the end, I had to flush their music out of my head; an eclectic dose of ...And Out Come the Wolves, Marathon, One-Two Punch and Paint Your Wagon did the trick.
Overall, the entire package comes across as trite. It's predictable electronic pop; all these guys are doing is following a formula. Hell, they go so far as to cop to it on the website. And it's not even good formula. It sounds like a high-school knock-off.
The album's bonus info was weak and lame. The interactive video for "Electric Feel" didn't work, as I couldn't find it on the difficult to navigate interactive front page. It did not come up with the autostart on the CD, and I couldn't uncover a hyperlink to it on the front page. That's poor design, or poor quality control. The tour photo album was ultra-low-budget in production and resolution, just stupid buddy photos, the kind of junk you shoot with your camera phone. The photos from the "Time to Pretend" video shoot were better in resolution, but sad in their amateurish pretense at art. This was not very impressive for product value-added.
These guys recently played the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC, and the Post's Patrick Foster was not impressed, calling them "perfectly good at being bad." He said they "look(ed) and sound(ed) both utterly incompetent and completely catchy." Foster points out, and I'd figured it out even before I read this slam of a review, that MGMT's big "hit," "Time to Pretend," isn't some cynical riff; it's an admission of where they really are. Maybe that's art, but it doesn't come off very well musically. It's all echo and synths, overdone, with the vocals intentionally buried way down in the noise.
Bottom line: I didn't enjoy this music, and didn't enjoy the entire package this "band" is pushing at me. It's not the worst I've ever heard--save that for Redbone Greatest Songs. I can't recommend it.
Description of Oracular Spectacular
MGMT invites you to open your mind to the multi-dimensional vibrating Technicolor sounds of Oracular Spectacular.The term Oracular Spectacular might not mean much, if anything, at all--it's essentially nonsensical--but that doesn't stop it feeling exactlyright. Here is a band that treats dizzy cross-eyed awe and a vast bounding sense of sonic weightlessness as their yardstick, jostling to surpass themselves on a track-by-track basis and aiming for the musical equivalent of performing somersaults in tye-dye t-shirts off the rings of Jupiter. MGMT seemingly submit this debut album as an application to acquire and even supersede The Flaming Lips' previously uncontested mantle as spiritual leaders of over-sized Technicolor psychedelic-indie with a soul, weird but not so weird that swelling crowds and even flirtations with the charts aren't a foregone conclusion. "Time to Pretend" opens and sets a tone for the record, producer David Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev) providing a familiar expanse for them to riff across with bull's-eye synths, massive drums and their twist on the template--retro 80s electro and abstract shapes, see Suicide and the Talking Heads for reference. "The Youth" is centred around a hypnotically looping refrain that recalls Pink Floyd and David Bowie, as interpreted by a mellow Secret Machines and the brilliant "Pieces of What" is Ryan Adams spinning through cosmos with classic Neil Young on his headphones. "Future Reflections" meanwhile stand on its hands on a line somewhere in-between XTC and Ween. Thrillingly eclectic, endlessly colourful and never predictable. It's all a bit ridiculous, but indeed spectacularly so. --James Berry
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