Grade: A
Although Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix may be gone, acid rock is still alive. MGMT's newest release, Congratulations, is a major step in reviving a genre that has gone underground over the past decade.
The only word to describe the Brooklyn-based duo's sophomore effort is "weird" –but in a good way. It's as if the music of David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Genesis somehow conceived a child together and its first words were "Flash Delirium," MGMT's first single.
"Flash Delirium" is a great psychedelic track and makes for a nice single. The track contains strange yet enthralling lyrics like, "Here's a growing culture, deep inside a corpse/Ages stuck together, taking it to the source."
Congratulations pays respects to its forefathers of San Francisco acid rock on the 12-minute-long "Siberian Breaks," which features a wide variety of synthesized keyboard melodies over acoustic guitar and faded vocals. Like the other tracks, "Siberian Break" has a great acid-induced ambience and makes for a great nostalgic hallucinatory experience.
Unlike the duo's first work Oracular Spectacular, this record doesn't have songs like "Time to Pretend" or "Kids," which drew a lot of attention from the rest of the album. Instead, the album has a much more abstract expressionist theme that provides many more memorable tracks.
Tracks like "It's Working" and "Song for Dan Treacy" are fairly upbeat with a post-punk bass line and bouncy drum pattern, but still retain the trippy atmosphere when you add in the bands signature guitar work.
While MGMT may be a band with three Billboard-chart topping tracks, Congratulations is a collection of songs that actually formulate an album rather than just a CD. Maturity is a good thing to see in a band, and MGMT shows they posses it with Congratulations.
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Photo: BarberJP / Wikimedia Commons
