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MGMT's Sophomore Release: Surprisingly Decent

While a bit overblown, Congratulations will ensure we have to hear the neo-hippies all summer long. Again.

MGMT

Congratulations

Released on Apr 13, 2010

In 2008, MGMT came out of relatively nowhere with Oracular Spectacular, a fun but uneven bit of space-pop that nonetheless caused the music world to blow its collective wad. Rolling Stone put it in their top 20 albums of the last decade, “Time To Pretend” and “Kids” started appearing in all manner of media left and right and Sir Paul McCartney himself expressed interest in working with them. So naturally, the next album from the duo (Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden) is reflective of this sudden burst of love and admiration.

It’s due to this that Congratulations is about to cause a backlash of epic proportions. Since putting the entire album up to stream on their website a month ago, audiences have driven themselves into opposing camps, a lot of people jumping on the sophomore slump bandwagon. With this in mind, it was pretty surprising to throw on the record and find that not only were the rumors of MGMT’s staggering failure greatly exaggerated, but that Congratulations is a massive hail mary of forward progression that sees a young band put their massive success way out on the line.

The band mentioned recently that they have no intentions of releasing any singles off the album. This is probably for the best, because there isn’t one. The closest the album comes would be “I Found A Whistle,” but that’s still a stretch, though the fans of this record have a new singalong-ready, trippy bit of balladry to raise their iPhones to. The first track to receive a video, “Flash Delerium”, rips through style changes, including a brief stop for a flute solo, before climaxing in a fuzzy punk breakdown. It also features one of the album’s cleverest lyrical plays, “Mass adulation/Not so funny,” an amusing tip of the hat to “Time To Pretend” and its eerie foreshadowing of the very world MGMT has already found itself in.

As with most relentlessly ambitious albums by a fairly new band, Congratulations isn’t perfect. The 12+ minute “Siberian Breaks” swings for the fences with a bit of proggy weirdness that at its best suggests The Who in the new millennium but more often at its worst threatens to derail the entire album. The title track starts off sounding like Pink Floyd but is a bit of a slump on which to close the album, and isn’t helped by the half-assed applause that ends it. Before that is “Lady Dada’s Nightmare,” a bit of instrumental dullness that isn’t justified, save for raising the track count to a whopping nine over almost 45 minutes.

However, when the album hits, it really hits. “Song For Dan Treacy” conjures ‘50s surf pop and the Monster Mash thrown into a blender with a synthesizer and brings to mind the soundtrack to Grease. Only, you know, on acid. The opener “It’s Working” also plays around with baroque surf rock, which makes you do a double take at the cover art, which on the surface is awful and in context actually makes quite a bit of sense. As a whole, this is an album by a band who’s decided to throw the gauntlet down before they even fully broke through. Congratulations is going to lose a lot of fans, but it may keep a few, and even gain those ready to meet this bit of high weirdness more than halfway. It also debunks the biggest gripe leveled against it: There are some very real rewards here if you buy into what MGMT has to sell you. Then again, maybe they’re not selling anything at all. They’re just swinging their heads in every direction, trying to escape the wolves of success.

Posted by Dominick Mayer on Apr 13, 2010 @ 6:00 am