MGMT - Congratulations

I heard "Oracular" all last summer, and I've been hearing it all this summer. "Kids" and "Electric Feel" never fail to make people dance. Very excited about this one.

Yeah it was a really fun record and I have a feeling the best from them is yet to come. I'm keen for their sophmore effort.

Time To Pretend, Electric Feel, and Kids are all such great songs it almost hurts how mediocre the rest of Oracular Spectacular is. I'm really hoping their next album is at least more consistent.

But can we all agree that Joanna Newsom is super hot in the kids music video?

I came to say the exact same thing.

I'll second this, I love those singles but the album is just a chore. Bizarrely when I saw them live they were way more interested in dicking around with their guitars like they were a post-rock group than actually playing the songs.

Yeah, I agree.

Their singles are good.

Their album was fair.

And that album art is red hot shit.

Seconded, but only because it makes me think of this...


The horror.

Two singles have appeared online (one on the official website and a controlled leak of the less "experimental" title song to mitigate any negative response to how weird the official release is).

I remember when I first talked with Ben Goldwasser in early 2006 (just before the band got signed) and I told him "that song Kids is sick; I bet that could get serious radio play" and he took it as a compliment but it was pretty apparent it wasn't exactly the compliment he wanted.

These guys see themselves as way more experimental than their image in the media. The word (second hand) from their close friends is that they were pretty unhappy while touring (in Akon's old tour bus) last year, because they see their music as fairly experimental and their audience sees it as dance music. So I expect the new album to be exactly the opposite of what most people are hoping for: really downbeat, difficult, and experimental.

But then there's always that song "Sleepyhead" by Passion Pit, which is actually pretty good. My friends' band is touring with Passion Pit so I kind of have to like them, though.

I never thought the rest of Oracular Spectacular was all that bad. It certainly doesn't hit the highs of Time to Pretend, Electric Feel or Kids, but calling it a chore? You gotta be kidding me, it's not even close. It's basically a completely different sub-genre of pop music. (Then again, from what I can glean off this forum most of what Spike listens to seems like a chore to me. :P)

Ok, onto Congratulations. I like it so far, but its obviously way different from OS. I'm hearing a lot of '60s psychedelic pop, mixed with modern European electro. But it's all very lush and moody with some surprising chord changes.

This album is awesome. I don't know what you guys are (kind of) complaining about. The garage rock/bottom barrel psychedelic pop makes me think of Nuggets. I really love this kind of shit.

Which is exactly my problem with it. I've got literally stacks and stacks of psychpop/-rock compilations from the sixties from which you could assemble myriads of playlists that are easily better than Congratulations. It's not that it's bad, it's just they don't add anything fresh to the canon. There's plenty of artists out there at the moment who either do retro better, or use the legacy in interesting new ways.

I'm actually really digging the album. Reminds me a LOT of Belle and Sebastian though, especially Flash Delerium which sounds like the B-Side to Belle and Sebastian's Step Into My Office.

My problem with Oracular Spectacular was always expectations. I assumed it'd be a high energy electro-dance album, and it wasn't.