Quick, Before It Melts.

There are days when I wake up and think that, if given the opportunity to live my life all over again, I'd take God up on that offer. The reason partly would be to go back and do all the things that I miss from my past that I'm either too old or too self-aware to ever do again. I used to spend hours playing with action figures on the stairs of my house, imagining worlds that seemed so real to me, even though they only existed in my mind. I miss sitting at the kitchen table and drawing--drawing anything--with a new fresh pack of pencil crayons. I'd go back and cherish the times I had with my Dad before we started our power struggles, and maybe even make more of an effort to tone down our arguments and fights.

The other reason I'd go back and do it all over again is to do all the things I didn't do because I was too shy and nervous. I'd be sure to get up and sing karaoke every chance I got, and I would have definitely had my first kiss ages before it actually happened. I'd go back and live the life I always wished I had, instead of wondering what it may have been life. I'd love to go and live the rock and roll dream.

When I listen to the lyrics of MGMT's "Time To Pretend" off their debut album, Oracular Spectacular, I think, "hey this song's kind of about starting over and doing things different!" It's very tongue-in-cheek, but that doesn't make it any less identifiable:

"Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives/I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and fuck with the stars/ You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars/This is our decision to live fast and die young/We've got the vision, now let's have some fun.."

But ultimately what it really says is what I knew all along: that any other life than the one I'm living now would just be a fake, and a disappointment.

I'll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms/I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world/I'll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home/Yeah, I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone/But there is really nothing, nothing we can do/Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew...

You don't often find such existential thinking as the hypothesis of a pop song, nay the best pop song going right now, but that's part of the beauty of MGMT's songs. They tried to tell Columbia Records that alien beings were using them as them as the vessel for creating some really weird music. Seeing as how they started out the band as a hobby intended to offend people at ramshackle performances, getting picked up by a major label and practically handed the opportunity to record an album, it's probably less alien intervention than it is divine intervention.

If you haven't heard MGMT yet, prepare to meet the makers of what may likely be the best debut album of the year, home to what is definitely going to be one of the songs of the year, "Time To Pretend." The band is a duo, Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden, who first met in college. "Time To Pretend" was the title track of an EP they released back in 2005. After graduation, they went their own ways, until A&R at Columbia wooed them back together to record Oracular Spectacular. There is no easy way to describe this album because it treats lines between genres like chalk drawings on sidewalks--once you start walking over them the lines all blur together. Suffice to say that MGMT are "boss." Check them out: