Congratulations

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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?”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

None of the songs are good enough as growers or deep tracks to hold up the album.

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.