Before I listened to MGMT’s second album, Congratulations, I had never heard Oracular Spectacular. I was one song away from being a hermetically ideal listener. Admittedly, that one track–”Time To Pretend”–is a hell of a track, which I’ve listened to about three hundred times since I first heard it (six months ago?). But I reconciled myself to Congratulations‘ not sounding anything at all like the old MGMT. (I’ve discovered subsequently that this is a good development, this is growth.) No, Congratulations is a staunchly mediocre psych album, and it’s a staunchly mediocre psych album on its own terms.
One of the things that sets 10 Listens apart from other music sites–that we listen to each album at least ten times before writing a review–is also quite dangerous for me. If I listen to anything ten times, I know I’ll start to like it, at least a little. If I hear a Justin Bieber song on the radio once, I may sort of detest its hellbent determination to infect the hearts and souls of America’s youth; by the tenth time I hear it on the radio, I’ll a hopeless convert, singing along to the chorus and bridge. The first time I listened to Congratulations, I didn’t hear anything. It sounded like–and I know this will sound cliche, but please bear with me–it sounded something like an off-the-rack paisley blouse. It all ran together in a familiar, obviously (self-consciously) psychedelic manner. It sounded like hell, and was entirely forgettable. It sounded lazy and derivative and more than a little goofy. I thought, if it weren’t from the band that made “Time To Pretend,” the whole thing would be forgettable and beneath comment.
After a while, though, Congratulations worked that starry-eyed magic that usually only happens on TV shows: It started out by offending me with its dowdy style, but after we spent enough casual afternoons hanging out, walking through the park and driving in the car together, having some adventures, and even some late nights together in bed, I started to fall for the album. Now, but please don’t misunderstand me: “Fall for” is a relative term, and in this case it means that I went from considering the album to be viscerally offensive, lazy, and unlistenable to being a predicable, somewhat, I guess, chill album that I could conceivably see listening to in very limited circumstances. (If it were the last album on the earth, I would probably listen to it.)
I understand MGMT has a lot of fans, and that this album is maybe supposed to sound different than their previous album. Unfortunately, it is almost exactly the same as mid-career Of Montreal–minus the genuine-sounding unhingedness and madcap laughs. But the album isn’t entirely terrible. Some of the songs are catchy despite themselves. “Song For Dan Treacy” is built on top of a very catchy, sweet guitar hook. But the drums clip and the sonic breakdowns are fairly raucous-yet-innocuous. In the final analysis, it sounds like the second-best parts of a few 60s surf-pop songs. “Flash Delirium” is probably the best (or second-best song–I’ll get to that, later) song on the album, and by that I mean it has a hummable melody and none of its (many) parts is offensive. “Brian Eno” is pretty catchy-sounding, but it seems to be purposely repetitive. A lot of the songs sound like they’re supposed to be kind of good but not too good. They embody that old design principle: Make one very obvious flaw that the client can correct, thereby leaving the rest of your design untouched. Unfortunately, we’ll never have a chance to correct the flaws. This album seems like it was intended to be a party album, but not a good one. The songs are supposed to be catchy, but not too catchy. I mean, Congratulations has a relentlessly boring twelve minute song smack in the middle of it.
The very best song on the album might be “Lady Dada’s Nightmare,” which sounds like an honest to goodness Air ripoff (circa The Virgins Suicides soundtrack, which is excellent). But that’s the sort of atmosphere Congratulations succeeds at creating: a sort of surreal, eerie, crazed soundscape. It sounds like what it feels like after you’re recovering the next day from taking too much acid. It’s in that way very modern. It’s something like a post-psychedelic album, an album that’s more Pynchonian paranoia than flower power. But that’s probably reading too much into it. It seems likely that MGMT can make a really good third album, and I’m sure they’ll get a chance. They can build on the manic atmospherics of Congratulations. But I wish we could skip this act and reach the climax.