So, your band puts out its first full length album, and the album garners praise and over a million in sales. You get invited to open for Radiohead, as well as slots at the South by Southwest, Glastonbury, and Cochella festivals. Your band's outlook is good. So what happens next? Well, if your band is MGMT (that's pronounced em-gee-em-tee), you release your second album, Congratulations.
The sophomore effort for any band presents a challenge for artistic output. Try as they might, some bands cannot help but release the same quality of work (The Beatles' With the Beatles), other bands manage to outperform their first body of work (Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique...eventually), and even some bands endeavor to expand and bloat beyond their original proportions (Guns N' Roses's Use Your illusion I & II). On Congratulations, MGMT takes great strides to distance itself from their first album (Oracular Spectacular), while directly musing about the sophomore slump, jinx, or challenge they inevitably face with this album.
The tunes are catchy enough, but nothing like the intelligent, yet accessible pop odyssey of their first album. Also, the lyrics are dense, and at times, indecipherable..definitely not the fluttering sing-songs of Oracular Spectacular. This divide may exactly be the point, however. The songs not only seem to address alienation and isolation, they actually seem to describe MGMT's experience (...mass adulation not so funny) or expectation of the experience (...I hope I die before I get sold) as a result of their immediate success.
(sigh)
Yet, the whole time I spent with this album, I felt compelled to continue comparing Congratulations to their first album. I truly tried to separate the two albums from one another so that I could absorb Congratulations on its own strength. However, I realized as the week progressed that Congratulations may actually need its predecessor in order for the listener to fully appreciate its context. This album repels itself away from Oracular Spectacular, challenging the band, the fans, and the critics. Yet it's as if Congratulations would have no purpose or point without Oracular Spectacular or its subsequently immense popularity. And at the end of it all, the album's closing track, 'Congratulations,' serves as a superlative for the listener who made it all the way through the album, as well as the band for working so hard to defy as many expectations as possible. The listener is even treated to the sound of applause as the final track decays into silence.
I can dig on the effort, and I can get behind MGMT's proactive approach to avoid being pigeonholed. But in all honesty, this is a dense album for a pop record. Some fans will no doubt run away, and I'm not sure what the likelihood is that the band will acquire any new ones. As far as I could hear, Congratulations contains very little in the way of a single. In fact, the band has even gone on record stating that they wanted to release a complete body of work instead of a batch of 'standout' singles. In the end, with Congratulations, MGMT has utterly shed themselves of their previous range and image, and at least they seem pleased with the results.
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