File 25: Oracular Spectacular
There are moments/things in your life that help shape who you are a person. It happens more times than none when you are still in your youth. Now it could be a relationship or a specific class in school but it mainly falls under the pop culture category. A TV show, movie, or album is detrimental to how you love things to this day or how you act. One album for sure hit me in a way that set off the chain of me loving alternative music and psychedelic-like rock to this day. That album is Oracular Spectacular by MGMT.
MGMT is a band from New York made up of core members Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser. They signed to Columbia Records after they graduated college and put out an EP. Columbia Records set them up with producer David Fridmann (worked with Flaming Lips) even though the band wanted Prince and Nigel Godrich. The 3 of them locked themselves into the Tarbox Road Studio in the spring and recorded the album in about 2 months. Oracular Spectacular was released on October 2, 2007.
The opening track is “Time to Pretend” and it’s the first of the 2 songs on this album that really just set it’s mark in pop culture history. This song was originally on their first EP of the same name that came out the previous year. The guys wrote the song during their senior year of college inspired by, I shit you not, a praying mantis that lived in their house. With the booming drums in the background and other mysterious noises playing, it’s quite the intro. The lyrics are mostly about leaving your ordinary life for something way more elegant with consequences. “Forget about our mothers and our friends/ We’re fated to pretend.” This song is in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and has been in pretty much every movie or show you have ever seen that deals with teenagers in the late 2000s. Gossip Girl, Girls, 90210, Skins, Alice in Wonderland, and Spider-Man: Homecoming have all used this song. The 2nd track is “Weekend Wars” and sounds like something inspired by the 1970s Rolling Stones. A couple electric guitars and 2 keyboards really make up this song as the boys talk about a weekend filled of drugs and car accidents.
Track 3 is “The Youth” and could quite possibly be the anthem for the modern day hippie. “This is a call to arms to live and love and sleep together/ We could flood the streets with love or light or heat, whatever.” It even sounds like they are signing the song at a peace protest through a megaphone. The 4th song is “Electric Feel” and yes it is the last song on the album that paved it’s way into the history of pop culture. Song is so damn good I am going to try and explain it. The song is literally about sex and the electric sensation it provides. “She’s gonna teach me how to swim” “Shock me like an electric eel” “I was standing there with nothing on” is all about sex. The production is so fantastic it just makes you want to start dancing even if you have no rhythm you can dance to this song. You ever seen that video of Kid Cudi dancing onstage while MGMT is performing this? Cudi gets it. “Kids” is the 5th song on the LP and is meant to give the listener nostalgia of the better times. When we were kids. Another iconic production filled with a great synthesizer with lyrics of “Control yourself, take only what you need from it.” Treasure that time when you had it.
The 6th song is “4th Dimensional Transition” and is the beginning of the psychedelic rock part of the album. This song has everything. A great build-up, killer drum bridge, and what it would be like to have your spirit leave your entire body. It’s one of the better songs on the album that doesn’t get talked about enough. “Pieces of What” is mainly just an acoustic guitar until about maybe half a minute in and tells a story of seeing war. “Cold blooded claws, never offered anything at all/ Past the point of love, shattered and untied” which means at this point a war has started and we could never recover. “Of Moons, Birds & Monsters” sounds like psychedelic rock meets an opera. It’s gorgeous. The song is pretty much about the Earth and global warming in particular but the craftsmanship in the instruments they use for this song is tremendous.
“The Handshake” is about the fear of selling out which is ironic for them because they didn’t even really want to be a band before they got a deal for Columbia Records. They just wanted to fool around with their instruments. “I just sealed the deal/ I’ll try not to let them take everything they can steal” is fear of having your creativity taken away from you. “We got the handshake under our tongue” references not only LSD but breaking away from the contract. “Future Reflections” is the last song on the album and is about if young people colonized and lived on an island ( that’s what the band had on their website when the album was out). “Red marker” “On the face and the hands” “On a green colored island” It’s a solid closer for this album, could not script it any better.
One of the interesting things about this album is that it wasn’t a success when it first came out. The album came out in 2007 but wasn’t physically out on CDs and such until January of 2008 and even then it only sold a few thousand copies. It came out during a time when alternative/psychedelic rock was becoming revived. Bands like MGMT, Foster The People, and Phoenix came at a time when MTV was still relevant for playing videos constantly and especially for my generation coming up in elementary and into middle school, this was important. We heard it in almost every teen movie, most commercials, video game soundtracks. It stuck with you especially growing up and not knowing who you are yet.
“Oracular Spectacular” was named the best album of 2008 by NME, Rolling Stone ranked it the 18th best album of the decade and included them in the list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and shifted the music circle. It’s some of the best pop music that ears have ever heard. 2 guys from college took a chance with just keyboards and some synthesizers and made one of the greatest records ever. It made me become attracted to different production especially at a time when rap music was so big, that’s special. It’s a strong debut album that will forever stand the test of time.
