The cover of Congratulations, MGMT’s sophomore album (out April 13), depicts a two-headed cartoon cat on a surfboard — one head looking forward, the other looking back — on the verge of being eaten by the wave it’s surfing. And that pretty much sums it up.
Like the cover, the album itself is a piece of psychedelia, half-teasing, half-earnest, and utterly trippy. It begins with “It’s Working,” a piece of up-tempo surf-rock, with the chanting refrain, “It’s working in your blood.” The song is hyperactive — it bounces along, building to a crescendo, stops dead and crashes down, before picking up again at an even more frenzied pace. “It’s Working” sets a tone for the rest of the album, a schizophrenic nine-song joy-ride, among which listeners will find the raucous Bowie-Beatles blend “Flash Delirium,” twelve space-and-time-sprawling minutes called “Siberian Breaks,” an instrumental (“Lady Dada’s Nightmare”) and the gorgeous title track.
Since it leaked a few weeks ago, the majority of what has been said about the album is about what it is not — quite simply, another Oracular Spectacular, the 2007 album that made the band famous with catchy hits like “Kids” and “Time to Pretend.”
Critics, egged on in part by comments made by the Brooklyn-based duo (Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden), have fretted over the commercial viability of the album. Peter Kember, who helped produced it, has said, “Nobody really knows how the album is going to be received.” The band’s co-manager Mark Kates has voiced a similar sentiment, “Every indication we’re getting is that people really want it… that doesn’t mean they’re going to like it, or that they’re going to buy it, or that it will sell more or less than the last record.”
VanWyngarden has said of Congratulations, “The people responsible for making money hoped that we’d record another ‘Time to Pretend’…but everyone close to us knew we weren’t going to do that.” The video for “Flash Delirium” eludes to a struggle over creative control: half-way through, Ben rips a bandage from his throat, revealing a gaping hole that appears to sing for a moment, before two suits rush forward to wrestle a wriggling eel from the wound. The eel is taken and forcibly deposited in a giant contraption that appears to have some transformative capacity… I’m not making this up! See for yourself…