Congratulations, MGMT

An album that made it on to triplew.me’s ‘Top Albums of 2010, so far’ list, MGMT's Congratulations is one that we missed covering first time around. We thought we’d take a fresh look at what we think could be one of the 'sleeper' albums of 2010.

To be honest, there has been a little speculation among the team here as to why we’d included MGMT’s release Congratulations in our ‘Best of 2010, To Date’ album list.  Partly to blame for this is that this is an album that was so unexpected, for many, and such a departure from 2008’s Oracular Spectacular and it’s smash-single Time to Pretend and the other stand-out remix-based dance-floor fillers like Electric Feel and Kids.

Making a second album is never an easy task and many fail under the pressure. In April this year, when we heard Congratulations (the follow-up to Oracular Spectacular by Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, the core duo of MGMT) we listened to it once and left it alone.

It didn’t grab, and almost sounded like something that was trying to be too hard to be something it wasn’t.  Perhaps, stupidly, we were also expecting Oracular Spectacular 2 or something. But that really shouldn’t have been expected, and as Goldwasser stated on an interview with French television earlier this year  “we felt a little bit misunderstood, labeled as an electro-pop duo…we’ve never identified with one style of music, we just wanted to make an album we felt that was a more accurate representation of music that we listened to”.

Great. But it still wasn’t a good album in our opinion.  Then the very psychedelic video for It’s Working came out, we stumbled upon it while snooping around YouTube in mid-June and we credit this video for changing triplew.me’s collective opinion. Suddenly it seemed so clear, the video and song on its own seemed so out of place, almost belonging within a greater mix, but the complexity of the band’s brand of psychedelia deserved another listen.  And something struck. It all began to make sense suddenly and attitudes changed.

The dry humor, sarcasm and cynical wit that emerge from every one of the Connecticut duo’s songs on Congratulations points to something even more remarkable, that potentially we’re all being taken on a journey of some kind, not a ride in the negative sense, nor a ‘trip’ as the psychedelic songs eek out of the speakers, but something more unknown, with the duo always keen to push the boundaries in some way.

As VanWyngarden puts it in a recent interview on German television “I think it’s more of a musician’s album, it’s about music and music as a career, some of it’s about fame but it’s not necessarily what we experienced with fame, more about others’ experience like Brian Eno, Lady Gaga or Mick Jagger”

Congratulations is not a collection of dance floor fillers, it’s  a collection of brilliant, genre defying, and inherently psychedelic songs that deserve the recognition of an album. From the opening track It’s Working through to the 12-minute opus Siberian Breaks, wrapping up, somewhat introspectively with the title track, Congratulations is an odyssey that truly needs to be listened to as a complete album.

Never knowing if it’s a cynical view of the world, a heartfelt thanks to the industry that they’ve become, or if the joke is on us (the songs Brian Eno and Lady Dada’s Nightmare both typify this lingering question).

Perhaps VanWyngarden (in the same German TV interview) sums it up best in his own way “It’s supposed to be something like an everlasting gobstopper in a way, you just don’t want bite into it and eat it all at once, supposed to keep showing different layers and different colors” Goldwasser adds “we want people to be a little confused when they listen to our music and we don’t want it to be easy to get, but we want it to be accessible”. Right. Sentiment understood, even if the metaphor is elusive.

It is, but it needs time to be nurtured, listened to and treated as an album. A concept so foreign in today’s world of iPods, shuffle playing and single downloads, that we missed it first time around.

Congratulations is available at Virgin Megastores and all good music retailers in the Middle East via Sony Music Entertainment.

Congratulations (pun intended) to the winners of the album giveaway that were notified by email - you will receive your prizes shortly.