Congratulations
Album | MGMT
Would benefit from being a lot weirder, or at least having more appealing tunes.
Anyone looking for evidence that the mythical sophomore slump actually exists need look no further than MGMT’s highly fraught (and overhyped) second album. Faced with the task of following up the runaway success of 2007’s Oracular Spectacular, the duo deliberately shunned the ear candy of “Kids” and “Time to Pretend” in favor of meandering psych jams that all too often go nowhere. One has to commend a band with the balls to follow their own freaky muse in the face of massive commercial risk, but self-conscious weirdness for its own sake does not a compelling record make. In fact, Congratulations would benefit from being a lot weirder, or at least having more appealing tunes. Producer Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember expands the band’s musical palette in interesting ways, particularly on tracks like “It’s Working” and “Flash Delerium,” but there's the unavoidable sense that the band had an abundance of ideas and tried to use all of them simultaneously, resulting in noodly 12-minute songs like “Siberian Breaks.” In the end, Congratulations is simply a misfire, and not even a particularly interesting one: just because you don’t want to be a pop star doesn’t mean you have to turn your back on writing good songs.
-
Music Review
The Perfect Prescription
Spacemen 3 -
Music Review
Yerself is Steam
Mercury Rev
