Under New Management
MGMT may look like another abhorrent internet acronym (Must Go Make Toast?), but its four letters really just stand for two New Yorker hipsters who decided their original band-name, The Management, didn’t ‘look cool enough’. And, sure enough, the MGMT dudes —Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser— trade in the currency of cool: their keyboard-totin', genre-dodging debut disc, Oracular Spectacular, awash in irony.
And MGMT are never more ironic than with their single "Time to Pretend," an instantly-annoying, cheaply sarcastic, rather Dandy Warhols-ish electro-rock anthem in which they try on the mask of rock mythology so as to mock it. The song finds VanWyngarden, at an often hysterical pitch, singing silly lines like “I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and f*ck with the stars/you man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars.” It's a pretty slight joke to build a song around, and if MGMT didn't come off as budding rockstars-in-training, it might seem more like a critique than a novelty song.
Eclectic Electric
There's better stuff on Oracular Spectacular, for sure. Opener/single "Electric Feel," a lurid shrine to hedonism, will likely be derided as one of the LP's lesser songs; for, if closer "4th Dimensional Transition" could stand up to an Animal Collective comparison, then "Electric Feel" could cop one to, er, Scissor Sisters. Yet, there's something way charming in the way this kicking-off jam openly embracing the falsetto-sung synth-funk fruitiness that the rest of the disc only dares to somewhat gingerly dabble in.
"The Handshake" borrows liberally from one of MGMT's obvious inspirations, the Flaming Lips. On it, producer Dave Fridmann (of, um, the Flaming Lips) commands a dense, reverb-rattling mix whose tenor changes from brittly acoustic, to spaced-out and anthemically, glamly Bowie-esque; before culminating in a militaristic climax that bashes out a single, lock-groove chord and its two titular words, whilst Fridmann throws cascading piano, incidental oscillations, and eerie whistling over the top.
The Dance of Diminishing Returns
The fact that MGMT dabble in an unidentifiable number of genres and timbres in the single song suggests where their artistic ambitions lie; the band never wishing to be constrained by a single style or mode. Yet, working in such a new-millennial meta-musical guise, they somehow don't seem fresh or futuristic at all.
Like all good postmodernists, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser sound like they're making reference to others who've made reference; this genre-juggling and style-dabbling modeled on others who've juggled genre and dabbled in styles. To me, MGMT sound nostalgic for mid-’90s nostalgia: evoking Beck’s evocations of Prince, echoing Air’s retrofuturist synthesizer symphonies, and borrowing from the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s recycling of Rolling Stones lore.
In such, it's hard to try and find a nugget of truth at Oracular Spectacular's core; a message kept behind MGMT's glittering, stylized façade. But, listening to their pastiche of pastiches —their pastiching of pastichers— perhaps it’s pointless to try and seek meaning. MGMT are but a pair of poseurs pirouetting through a musical hall of mirrors.
Record Label: Columbia/Sony
Release Date: 22 January 2008
