“Congratulations” opens with surf guitar and rolling drums, the sound of which is, quite frankly, a little annoying. But it lasts for only a moment, and soon the song called “It’s Working” opens up into something indicative of all nine of these tracks ““ complex, sprawling and insistently psychedelic.
Acid trips were essentially synonymous with MGMT already. What’s surprising about “Congratulations” is how well it coheres into a crafted, mature album. It is fun, sometimes silly music done seriously, even thoughtfully.
It is not a rehash of “Oracular Spectacular,” their breakout debut album. There is nothing on “Congratulations” that could fill a dance floor, as the hit “Electric Feel” has done. There is nothing to become so brilliant a hipster anthem as “Time to Pretend.”
Instead, there is a 12-minute suite called “Siberian Breaks,” a spacewalk through synth galaxies and lyrical basslines. There is a rowdy tribute to Brian Eno, and another to Dan Treacy of the English band Television Personalities. There is an instrumental called “Lady Dada’s Nightmare,” which might serve nicely as the foundation for a delirious ballad by Lady Gaga.
There is also, it must be said, a lot of prettiness in the album. The vocals on “Oracular Spectacular” were often either buried beneath production effects or strained and somewhat grating, suggesting that Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, MGMT’s main men, related to Thom Yorke’s stated discomfort with his own voice.
But that album also contained a hint of things to come, a song called “Of Moons, Birds & Monsters.” It was the most ambitious of the tracks, and the one most firmly rooted in the late-1960s psychedelia that so dominates the aesthetic of “Congratulations.”
MGMT now seem more confident in that musical fetish of theirs, and in the quality of their singing. Several of the songs are actually quite lovely, at least in part, sung with sincerity rather than irony. “Someone’s Missing” could even be called earnest or plaintive, as could the unexpectedly touching “I Found A Whistle,” and both of them build to layered, emphatic crescendos. The title track closes the album over a descending bass scale Paul McCartney might enjoy, with a bittersweet note about a congratulatory sentiment phony enough to give Holden Caulfield conniptions.
When Spin Magazine put VanWyngarden and Goldwasser on the cover in 2008, the guys presented their band as a kind of extended prank, something to be taken with a wink and a laugh. “Congratulations” reveals that cavalier attitude to be little more than a psychological safety net, the way schoolchildren pretend they don’t care about not getting invited to the cool kid’s birthday party. They are honest musicians at heart, with a sincere love, apparently, of late Beatles and early Pink Floyd. “Congratulations” is not a record for this new decade, or for the three or four before it. It is a fully imagined period piece, with meticulous attention paid to the details.
VanWyngarden and Goldwasser need not worry about wearing their musical hearts on their tie-dyed sleeves. “Congratulations” may be thoroughly retro, but it transcends pastiche because it is built of strong, memorable songs, because MGMT is too weird and too inventive to sound like a retread. These guys make great music because they believe in it, and it’s time for them to stop pretending otherwise.
E-mail Goodman at agoodman@media.ucla.edu.