Curse you MGMT, I used to truly and completely hate you and your awful music. You have all the music publications going sickeningly gaga over your sound; one review awards you album of the year, summing up the review assuring the reader “you’ll be hard-pressed to find a record with more musical depth and warmth all year than this one”[1]. Another makes you out to be a musical savior, stating “at a time when truly great music seemed to be AWOL, MGMT arrived on the scene and restored faith across the land with their album, the remarkable Oracular Spectacular”2. Or the who would have guessed it praise from good ol’ Rolling Stone, who has the nerve to praise you via comparison, saying that within the songs, there are “hints of Joy Division and Sixties nostalgia both acid-tinged and bluesy”3. After reading all of this over-hyping dreck, I still hate you, but it’s time for me to admit that “Electric Feel” is just too fucking catchy to hate. It’s a near perfect mishmash of era-spanning (or aping) sounds: the pseudo-tribal beat that sounds as if it was lifted from Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” and forced to mate with any recent Flaming Lips song that creates a steady groove for the synth to float upon. The slow and smooth funk bass line which was obviously designed to make the hips of its sonic victim shake without them even realizing it. Or the vocals sang in a scratchy and harmonized falsetto, the type that pleases the most over-the-top, overproducing music producers (in this case, Mercury Rev’s Dave Fridmann), makes most men wince, and manages to piss off the rest of the music loving population. It’s a song that is so insanely likable that I half expect to see it played over a commercial for Disaronno or Corona. All half-kidding aside, I have to congratulate you MGMT (who I call Management, because that’s what MGMT is short for!). Even with all of the nonsensical praise showered upon you, as if there has never been anyone that sounded like you (not David Bowie, Postal Service, Kate Bush, Animal Collective, M83, Nitzer Ebb or shades of Ariel Pink to name a few), this one gem of a song is enough to make even the biggest hater strut out onto the dance-floor. A brief tip of the cap to you, sirs.
-Mark B.
[1] From NME Review: MGMT- Oracular Spectacular. (www.nme.com/reviews/9519)
2 From Indiemusic.com Review: MGMT- Oracular Spectacular (indiemusic.suite101.com/article.cfm/mgmt_the_band_oracular_spectacular_album_review#ixzz0HUTrN9MI&A)
3 From Rolling Stone Review: MGMT- Oracular Spectacular (www.rollingstone.com/artists/mgmt/albums/album/16604436/review/18057359/oracular_spectacular)
Nevermind The Posers 