Review: MGMT – Congratulations

April 13th, 2010 by Oswald Hobbes / Comment on this post

Under certain conditions, MGMT‘s sophomore effort Congratulations is awesome, mind-blowing stuff -- lots of psychedelic organs, jerky arrangements that spiral into giddy chaos, even a twelve minute song-suite that ends with almost three straight minutes of bubbly, percolating synths. Overall the boys have gotten weirder since their debut (Oracular Spectacular), and less inclined to temper that weirdness with bubblegum hooks -- there’s no “Time To Pretend,” which is kind of a bummer, but you gotta expect a few kinks in the second record. Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, the precocious art-punks who formed MGMT in Brooklyn eight years ago, acquit themselves nicely in the “experimentation” department, and most of the songs here are solid enough to get over (or at least make an impression) even when the experiments don’t quite work. That is, as I said, under certain conditions -- for instance, freshman-year acid trips. If you’re not doing any experimenting yourself, though, the whole thing is kind of a snooze.

Take that twelve-minute song suite (“Siberian Breaks”), for example. The track cycles through about five different permutations of its central melody; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. About halfway through it seems to lose all direction before coming back harder and stronger, with drums that sound like the apocalypse. There are parts that sound like Steely Dan, parts that sound like mid-90s techno, and parts that just sound like good old MGMT -- the best news about Congratulations is that these guys definitely have their own sound, and they know what they’re doing, and when they do an entire album of that, it’s going to be absolutely rad. But “Siberian Breaks” just doesn’t work, and neither does much of the record’s back half -- “Lady Dada’s Nightmare” falls victim to the same aimlessness, and “Briano Eno” is just too much after three songs on the first half that sound almost identical to it. (Dan Treacy also gets his own song, if you’re keeping track at home; this kind of name-dropping would be annoying if the boys couldn’t back it up, but they generally can, and do.)

The first half of the record is much, much stronger: “It’s Working” and “Flash Delirium” are both crafty, twisty bangers, eschewing the upfront likability of the duo’s most popular tracks and delving, instead, into delightfully odd new territory -- there really is nobody else that sounds like this right now (especially, as in the case of “Flash Delirium”) on the first single from their eagerly anticipated second album. So kudos to that, if nothing else. But wait, I have other kudos to bestow: “Song For Dan Treacy” is inspired, Libertines-y pop, and “Someone’s Missing” and “I Found a Whistle” are both mini-epics that start wispy and malnourished but blossom into full-on pop-nirvana climaxes. And the title track, nestled at the end of the record, is probably the prettiest to be found here, and also the one part of the record where VanWyngarden and Goldwasser drop the act and make something unashamedly beautiful and nice.

So, Congratulations is not bad. It’s actually pretty good, and I find myself liking MGMT a lot more even though this record isn’t as fun or listenable as Oracular Spectacular. They show that their hearts are in this music game for the right reason, and now that they’ve proved they can be genuinely weird and inaccessible when they feel like it, hopefully they won’t really do it anymore and can go back to making all the hipsters dance around wearing Day-Glo face paint. Because that was fun, and it felt natural and right in a way that all of this “experimentation” just doesn’t.