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8

The first great record of 2008 has already arrived, and it goes by the name Oracular Spectacular. You don’t know MGMT, the electro-pop duo from Brooklyn, but you’ll recognize the songs. The partially cooky 80’s keyboards, the reverb and echo heavy classic rock vocals, the 60’s power-pop choruses, and the disco funk bass lines are all too familiar. Most likely, it’s meant to be that way. Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, who started out doing genre parodies and joke songs, never intended to make a serious record. Their Sony debut is just that.

“Time to Pretend,” the album’s first track, is a joke song within itself. The uber-distorted sounds and dance beat make it as sarcastic as it is catchy; “Let’s make some music, make some money, find some models for wives.” Sounds like a plan that only a song like “Time to Pretend” could bring to fruition. Other plans include, but are not limited to; “move to Paris” and “shoot some heroin.” The album quickly changes pace on “Weekend Wars” and “Youth,” both a sort of folky electronic classic rock tribute to all of the above.

The lead single, “Electric Feel,” brings the disco funk I mentioned earlier in modern/retro Scissor Sister style. Some overly dramatized high pitch vocals and swimmy “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” keys make the song almost an audio caricature of what it’s meant to be; “Oh girl, shock me like an electric eel/Oh baby girl, turn me on with your electric feel.” Throw in a video that looks like it was made on a $500 budget with an audio visualizer program for Windows 3.1, and…basically, it’s the best.

Album highlight (and one of the better songs in long while), “Kids,” is described by the band as a song “filled with all those college feelings: naivety, idealism, nostalgia, happiness, sadness.” It’s also filled with catchy everything, and sort of reminds me of what The Killers would sound like if they didn’t listen to so much Bruce Springsteen.

For the most part, Oracular Spectacular is a heavily synth-laced electronica album, but other influences of classic rock and pop are ever-present. The combination makes it arguably more interesting than most of their “Brooklyn based” or “dance-rock” peers. Not taking itself seriously is the most important thing this record accomplishes – and, in retrospect, makes the songs even that much better.