Music Review: MGMT, “Congratulations”
Rating: 88
MGMT’s “Congratulations” is a musical act of bravery in which Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden cast aside expectations of groovy indie dance rock and get deeply, deliriously psychedelic. There’s very little modernism on “Congratulations” — MGMT circa 2010 has more in common with Syd Barrett, Love or the Zombies than it does with Passion Pit or Hot Chip. But this is hardly an ill-advised wig flip: MGMT might not retain the fair-weather friends who loved “Kids” or “Time to Pretend,” but the beautiful strangeness of “Congratulations” will earn them long-term relationships.
Driven by pounding surf drums and harpsichord, MGMT comes booming forward with “It’s Working,” a wild-eyed flurry of love and madness, and continues with the bold-as-brass tribute to the British neo-psychedelic band Television Personalities, “Song for Dan Treacy.” The quickly changing “Flash Delirium” delivers with spot-on “Aladdin Sane”-era David Bowie affectations, setting up for the MGMT’s opus, the 12-minute “Siberian Breaks.”
“Siberian Breaks” is a collection of fragments that fit together beautifully as a suite, and to MGMT’s credit, its dozen minutes don’t feel pretentious — there is a natural flow here. As produced by Sonic Boom of the Spacemen 3 and engineered by Dave Fridmann, “Congratulations” pulls from a broader sound palette than 2008′s “Oracular Spectacular,” but VanWyngarden and Goldwasser wrote melodies that fully earn what is done on their behalf. “Congratulations” are definitely in order here.
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Comments
Thank you, Josh — I’m convinced that those who get beyond the initial sonic shock will find a kind of unexpected mini-masterpiece in “Congratulations.” These guys have such well-developed musical vocabularies, and I can only imagine where they’ll be in 10 years. Glad you liked the review.
“MGMT might not retain the fair-weather friends who loved “Kids” or “Time to Pretend,” but the beautiful strangeness of “Congratulations” will earn them long-term relationships.” (Music Review: MGMT, “Congratulations”, staticblog) Great review and great choice of words. This is a fantastic album, a lot of so called ‘MGMT Fans’ did not like this album. But in reality, I believe they wanted an album exaclty like ‘Oracular Spectacular’, but ‘Congratulations’ is equally as good, if not better.
MGMT came out with a solid performance and if you listen to the album as a whole, you will find the true meaning of MGMT and their ideology towards music.