MGMT - Oracular Spectacular

Brooklyn looks like it’s the most fertile musical ground in the whole of America at the moment - in 2007 we saw the likes of Vampire Weekend, Yeasayer, Dirty Projectors and about eight million others all emerge blinking from the various practise rooms and bars in Williamsburg into the outer world. MGMT (pronounced ‘Management’, natch) are the most recent - a pair of transplanted Brooklyn residents who sound like the missing link between Muse, !!!, Scissor Sisters and, er… everything inbetween. Really.

Most of debut album ‘Oracular Spectacular’’s messy pop is layered with a healthy amount of fuzz and 70s-style psychedelia, which isn’t a suprise when you consider it was produced by Flaming Lips knob twiddler Dave Friedman. Openers ‘Time To Pretend’ and ‘Weekend Wars’ are particular highlights, the latter sounding like an LSD-assisted Rolling Stones and the former having the most braincrushingly brilliant keyboards this side of Holy Fuck.

The rest is a suprisingly joyful mish-mash of everything - ‘The Youth’ and ‘The Handshake’’s blissed-out post-prog drones and shimmers soulfully, ‘Electric Feel’ gives Nic Offer and his !!! buddies a run in the scuzzy punk-funk stakes, while the fantastic ‘Kids’ takes Mates Of State’s fairground organ pop and gives it a heaving makeover. Even the simple, croaking country-rock of ‘Pieces Of What’ doesn’t sound out of place on a record this diverse.

It’d be a shame if ‘Oracular Spectacular’’s all-over-the-place pop was lost under the stampede of other New York buzz bands vying for your attention now we’ve reached 2008 - it’s one of the best and most unexpectedly accomplished records the borough’s produced in ages.