Congratulations

MGMT - Congratulations
Critic Score
Based on 35 reviews
2010 Ratings: #567 / 924
Year End Rank: #29
User Score
2010 Rank: #37
Liked by 405 people
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CRITIC REVIEWS

100
Mojo
Brooklyn duo deliver shock psychedelic masterpiece.
91
A.V. Club
It offers one sonic reward after another, and the band remains as inviting as ever.
90
Billboard

The new nine-song album blends psychedelia with elements of post-punk, surf rock and even folk.

90
AllMusic

From the opening moments of the sublime “It’s Working” all the way to the titular closer, Congratulations is an incredible follow-up from a band that is still maturing into some unknown entity.

80
Uncut
This is a wilful and lovably eccentric second album from a band who've had a sniff of being pop stars and decided they'd much rather be weird and esoteric, thanks all the same.
80
Q Magazine
The album evokes not claustrophobia but space and freedom: an exhilarating screw-the-consequences leap into the bizarre.
80
The Needle Drop

MGMT's Congratulations makes me want to say this to the band: Congratulations.

80
SPIN
MGMT may be dazed, but they’re not tweaked out yet.
80
American Songwriter

MGMT plots a strange course for their listeners with Congratulations, but the material here often exceeds that of the band’s initial full-length.

80
Under the Radar
They never fully reconcile this conundrum, but have nonetheless created a fine record, which, while distantly removed stylistically from their first, doesn't lose grasp of their innate pop instincts, channeling them in a more elliptical, silvery manner.
78
Coke Machine Glow
While MGMT may no longer peddle the kind of instant-pleasure-point melodic textures that propelled the band's most well-known songs into so many playlists, they're up to something far more interesting: releasing a major, mainstream objet d'art without for a minute fooling themselves that it "matters."
75
Entertainment Weekly
Undoubtedly, some fans will be left feeling deflated, but this odd little sonic onion ultimately rewards those patient enough to peel the layers.
70
Drowned in Sound

Congratulations is no more impenetrable than the Flaming Lips at their most commericial, with Sonic Boom offering a bright, upfront mix that keeps the baffling array of omichords, guitars, sitars, synths, organs and FX percolating in dynamic, uncluttered fashion.

70
DIY
Bold, brave, bonkers, and sometimes brilliant.
70
God Is in the TV

MGMT remain great songwriters, and at the heart of much of Congratulations are great songs. It's just that this time around, they've gone back to basics, borrowing a slew of enduring influences, making popular music the way it was made when popular music was still in its infancy.

68
Pitchfork
Every track here has successful passages, but frustratingly, they too often turn out to be detours or trap doors. In general, the less cluttered and more focused their tracks are, the better they turn out.
63
Pretty Much Amazing

The fact of that matter is that Congratulations remains a sketch, a half-baked attempt to distance MGMT from its previous oeuvre.

63
Beats Per Minute
In the end, it sounds less like a step forward, and more like a trek into the past glory of ’60s psychedelic – but with nothing new added to the formula.
60
NOW Magazine
None of the songs hit as hard as Kids or Electric Feel, but there's also no filler (which is more than we can say for OS). Instead, the band delivers a consistent if self-indulgent offering of oddball prog-pop.
60
The Telegraph
The follow-up might not exactly be an act of self-sabotage, but it veers perilously close in its aura of self-indulgence and self-amusement.
60
The Sydney Morning Herald

Congratulations will likely be seen as a firm ''up yours'' by a lot of fans. I can see their point but I wonder if they'll see MGMT's point, that standing still is more boring than any tricky double-neck guitar heroics could ever be.

60
Evening Standard

As with The Flaming Lips' recent album, Embryonic, it adds up to commercial suicide, but it makes an interesting change from bands desperately clinging to a winning formula.

60
The Guardian

Their mainstream audience should flee now, but Congratulations is more than mere commercial suicide. Their perversity has produced a sonic adventure, with lovely moments.

60
Rolling Stone

With Congratulations, they attempt to not just keep it weird — which they've done — but to figure out how they can be in it for the long haul. It's a solid start.

60
HipHopDX
Cliché’s, presented as is with no attempt at exploration or deconstruction, will never be revelatory or mind expanding, will never display your “artistic depth” to the popular masses. MGMT have proven this by making one of the biggest clichés of all, the “difficult second album.”
60
NME

Overall, MGMT's refusal to co-operate with the listener jars with the crisp and professional production – which, despite Sonic Boom's involvement, is more Van Dyke Parks than Spacemen 3 and leaves Congratulations sitting somewhere in the middle, not complex enough for the prats, but too obscure for the jerks.

60
PopMatters

In the absence of Oracular’s pulsing, dance-ready synth-pop, Congratulations takes its cues from the cosmic-charged psychedelia of that album’s latter half.

60
musicOMH
It's a brave, sometimes successful, but ultimately flawed attempt to evolve and grow the band's sound. The one crime is a distinct lack of any memorable tunes, but it will certainly stand as one of 2010's more interesting releases.
50
Slant Magazine
In striving rather openly to set their sophomore effort apart from what they view as the critically acclaimed trappings of their debut, MGMT offers what is, essentially, an album of B-sides--a few bright spots strung together with half-baked concepts and monotony, in need of a lot less knob-tweaking and a whole lot more rewrites.
50
Sputnikmusic
MGMT have (purposely?) lost that instant magic that they effortlessly whipped up with those debut singles, and in trying to re-establish themselves as artists that don't need the commercial mainstream to survive, they've created a record that lacks any defining characteristics to call its own.
50
Consequence of Sound

Here’s one important question though, and answer it after you’ve finished Congratulations: “Would you even listen to this record if it wasn’t by MGMT?”.

50
Tiny Mix Tapes

While the only ostensible reason for MGMT’s stylistic 180 is to seem less like a lightweight pop act, the songs on Oracular were far more engaging and better written than almost anything here.

45
Prefix

Congratulations shares nary a sonic smidgen with Oracular Spectacular, instead existing in a netherworld where mod-era psychedelia meets prog-rock and where the ecstatic heights of the band's debut don't exist.

40
No Ripcord
None of the songs are good enough as growers or deep tracks to hold up the album.
40
Spectrum Culture

Expectations are always high on a sophomore album, and Congratulations doesn’t even try to live up to what fans may have wanted, but doesn’t quite work on its own terms, either.

UltimateLifeFrm
85

Happy Birthday to @Gustavstone07

MGMT are a gem of a band, who have delivered a mostly consistent streak over their careers since their breakthrough with Oracular Spectacular, a solid album in my eyes, even though the singles are considered some of the best tracks of the 2000s. "Kids" and "Electric Feel" are some of my favourite tracks from that decade as well.

The duo's second album Congratulations marks as a departure from the synthpop driven sound of their debut, ... read more

MySoftBulletin
80

Siberian Breaks is one of the finest songs this decade has to offer

Tristan
NR

Woohoo, today was my birthday! You know what that means: special birthday review!
I decided to revisit and re-review one of my favorite albums of all-time, "Congratulations" by MGMT. This record is very important for me, as when I first heard it, it opened up a new musical world to me. Before listening to this album, I had little experience with psychedelic music, and it had yet to become a favorite genre of mine. Thanks to this record, however, I was able to change the way I viewed ... read more

96

"what the hell am i riding this wave for?"

denkirena
100

silliness if it was music

Xbot
68

this guy

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