0 Shares

Photo by:

Spoiler alert: if you expect to hear another “Electric Feel” or “Kids” on MGMT’s new album, you’re in for a big surprise.

On the band’s debut, MGMT created a sonic landscape so vibrant, so colorful, so mysterious that few could hate it.

The 2008 album, Oracular Spectacular, was an infectious 10-song collection of good times.

Band members Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden had created something that was, for lack of a better word, spectacular.

On the follow-up, Congratulations, MGMT takes that hipster groove they had so effortlessly masterminded – who could forget that synth line in “Time to Pretend”? – and throw it away for something even more experimental: psychedelic rock that is 50 years late of its heyday.

So does the ‘60s rock of Congratulations sound out of place in the current state of music, where decade after decade of music blends together with the touch of the shuffle function?

Not quite. Don’t expect to hear the surf rock of opening track “It’s Working” playing anywhere other than at Gunther Toody’s.

Yet, that being said, “It’s Working” is as delicious as the Howdy Doody BBQ Burger, if that’s what you’re in the mood for.

However, not all nine songs on Congratulations go down as well.

“Siberian Breaks” is MGMT’s 12-minute attempt to recreate “Bohemian Rhapsody” for the iPod generation, with transitions that sound out of place and lyrics that are hard to understand.

Worse, you’ll get lost in what sounds like five different songs wrapped into one.

Then there’s “Lady Dada’s Nightmare,” a mellowed instrumental that, while inspired by Lady Gaga herself, is a far cry from the excitement of any of her work – or MGMT’s, for that matter.

Surely that’s the irony, that the blandness of this song is what Gaga would consider a musical nightmare.

Luckily, the closing track sees MGMT return to reality.

Strip away the excess – the surf guitars, the synthesizers and the pop culture references – and you have “Congratulations,” an MGMT song that sounds exactly like you’d hoped it would on album number two.

It may have taken the band two years and eight recordings to get to “Congratulations,” but it is worth the wait.

Sounding as magical as David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” but as distinctively MGMT as “Time to Pretend,” Goldwasser and VanWyngarden finally do what they do best: they stop caring about who will buy their song off iTunes and deliver a song that can be put on repeat.

And that, MGMT, is something to be congratulated on.

0 Shares