MGMT: Oracular Spectacular [COLUMBIA]

Why you'll love it

Three songs here ("Time to Pretend," "Electric Feel" and "Kids") turned a couple of Wesleyan pals into festival headliners, and the album has sold upwards of three million copies. Rolling Stone put it on its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.

This edition

• Single LP, 10 tracks
• Columbia pressing
• Produced by Dave Fridmann (the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev)

About the album

For an "accidental" band formed while principal players Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser were swapping musical ideas at Wesleyan University, MGMT has done thoroughly alright by itself.

So strong, in fact, were the pair's initial forays into music-making together (the indelible singles "Time to Pretend" and "Electric Feel" chief among them) that they were alarmed to receive a call from Columbia Records inquiring if MGMT might be interested in a major-label deal, maybe a little bit before the two friends had completely realized they were an actual band. They thought it was a joke. It was not. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Oracular Spectacular is, in any case, a fairly ... well ... spectacular debut and has quietly sold upwards of three million copies worldwide since it arrived in October of 2007, while MGMT has gone on to carve out a curious, fairly uncompromising psych-y electro-pop niche all to itself on the fringes of the mainstream while not actually catering to the mainstream in any way. So job well done, really.

Also at Kops: more MGMT on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Columbia, first out in 2007.