In our brave new digital world, music news can get broken -- and swept away -- before a band has even released a full-length album. With the advent of musical outlets like My Space and Hypemachine, new music has become more accessible and proportionately more disposable. The full-length album has become an antique, lost in the shuffle of hot new downloads: Audiences can obsess over a new band and forget them just as easily before the group has even been signed to a major record label.
This past summer I became fixated with a band called the Management. A friend had only one song and knew even less about the group, but that first night we played the song on repeat until his iPod died. Trapped on a ranch in the Rocky Mountains, the song "Kids" became anthemic: "Picking insects off plants, no time to think of consequences."
Half a year later, the group has racheted up their cachet by evolving into MGMT (still pronounced management) and released their first full-length studio album, "Oracular Spectacular" (2008). The virulently catchy "Kids" has been playing everywhere on campus; I even recognized the chorus as it was whistled by a student while crossing the Green.
The catch-and-release hot song I first heard on a fly-fishing ranch in Colorado could just as easily have dropped out of my consciousness permanently -- barring iTunes shuffle-induced moments of nostalgia -- but MGMT, it seems, is a keeper. It used to be the jump from debut to sophomore album that critics scrutinized; these days it's the transition from internet single to full-length release that takes its toll on so many Next Big Things.
MGMT seems aware of their precarious position, however, as the album's opener (which the group describes as a mission statement) professes they are "fated to pretend." But the duo of Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, who graduated from Wesleyan University in 2005, isn't dissuaded: "What else can we do? Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?"
"Oracular Spectacular" is a thoroughly impressive debut, imposing a comprehensive and creative vision throughout all ten tracks. Evidence abounds, from their kaleidoscopic web site to the trippy video for "Time to Pretend," that MGMT is positioning themselves at the forefront of the psychedelic revival. Like Brit-pop phenom Mika, there's a strain of Queen's influence, though MGMT's chameleon electronic stylings are far harder to pin down. The band's site describes their sound as "hallucinatory."
MGMT first made their name terrorizing audiences at Wesleyan. Originally the group was more performance art than recording artist -- each show was pure spontaneous electronic improvisation, composed of one song that would last for 15-20 minutes. Their off-beat shows grabbed attention, though, and soon sold out.
MGMT quickly began concocting their own post-college pop, with undertones of their more radical beginnings. "This is our decision: to live fast and die young," sing the duo in their mission statement. The entire album sounds like an irresistable musical bildungsroman, an attempt to combine Holden's edginess with a flowerchild's idealism. All in all, "Spectacular" is one of the best debut albums I've heard in years.
This makes for an essential spring event: MGMT will be enacting a live oracular spectacular at Friday Night Rock on April 12.
