MGMT's Anti-Breakout Album: Congratulations

We are absolutely dead serious about music-making, and that’s what we want people to understand, that there’s no joke in it. We’re not intentionally trying to f*ck with people, we’re actually making this music that we love and we want people to hear it.¹ ~ Ben Goldwasser

You may not be familiar with MGMT, but anyone who had a pulse in the late 2000’s has most likely heard their work. Don’t believe me? Give this a listen and tell me it doesn’t ring a bell.

Widely considered a two-hit-wonder by the radio-listening public (the other being Time to Pretend), MGMT seemed destined to a fate of former-pop-star obscurity. So two years after their smash-hit album Oracular Spectacular, MGMT released their sprawling, hook-less sophomore effort Congratulations to unanimous critical … confusion. But, Contratulations wasn’t an intentional career suicide attempt (as many critics quickly branded it); it was the album that MGMT needed to make.

MGMT was on top of the world in 2008, and they didn’t know what to do about it. Their debut album had just gone gold in the US and double platinum in the UK. They headlined at music festivals and toured with Radiohead and Paul McCartney. Not too bad for a project that Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden never intended to be any more than a joke. At Wesleyan University, MGMT was known as the band that performed the Ghostbusters theme for 45 minutes straight in snowman costumes. Even their name, MGMT, was a sardonic reference to their goal to “sell out as quickly as possible” to the “Management” of the corporate music conglomerate. VanWyngarden puts it best:

When we wrote Time to Pretend, we were totally taking the piss out of the rock star thing. And all of a sudden that song was, like, a single, and we had to play it every day for … two … years.²

As an artist, what do you do when your entire career is built on totally disingenuous work?

If you’re MGMT, you release Congratulations.

The ascending, reverb-soaked guitar prepending It’s Working signals that MGMT has changed dramatically since 2008. Lyrics dreaming of hyper-stardom are traded for a Yes-adjacent nonsense. Gone are the rudimentary-yet-addictive synth hooks and bombastic Fridmann drums. In their place are surf guitars, 60’s organs, and harpsichords (???). Producer Sonic Boom (of Spacemen 3 fame) earns his pay: this is a well, albeit strangely, produced album. Production quirks like the beater-less kick drum in Song for Dan Treacy and massive, ‘verbed out snare in Siberian Breaks utilize familiar instruments in offbeat ways, seemingly for strangeness’ sake alone. The album is lush at times, and at others jarring and oblique. But this instrumentation is just a jumping-off point for Congratulations’ most notable and interesting aspect: it’s songwriting.

Congratulations is crazy and yet, it’s also strangely addictive. In many ways, Congratulations is an anti-Tame Impala album. Instead of meticulously crafting buildups to emotional peaks of payoff, Congratulations opts to chase rabbit trails and go off the beaten path. Lead-off track It’s Working places half-second pauses between its distinct segments, seemingly acknowledging the musical incompatibility of each idea. It’s as if MGMT themselves don’t even know how to string them together and ask you, the listener, to fill in the gaps. Each song contains up to six or seven of these separate ideas, held together only by the common thread of instrumentation. At times, it’s confusing and dense and claustrophobic. But in doing this, MGMT create their own brand of buildup. The chaos of the first two verses in standout track Flash Delirium is used to greater multiply the spectacle of the bombastic, Spector-esque outro. This songwriting method allows MGMT to build towards payoff without making these peaks feel cheap or manufactured. On this musical journey, MGMT are enthusiastic local guides instead of corporate tour coordinators.

This album can best be described as isolated, consistent flashes of greatness. Interestingly, this description mirrors MGMT’s response to the dilemma of to pop-stardom in the first place. A joke band that broke up and re-formed after being headhunted by Columbia Records, their fame only lasted as long as their songs remained on the top 40. But instead of clinging desperately to relevance, MGMT took a bold step away from financial and career security in favor of their own artistic integrity. This album stands as a musical reminder that but it takes real boldness to step away from fame and success, but the rewards of artistic freedom are much sweeter than the bitterness of being chained to other peoples’ expectations.