Top Ten Albums 2010:

2. MGMT - Congratulations

On paper, 2010 seemed like an all out loss for MGMT. Music listeners spent the second half of 2010 looking for reasons to talk shit about Congratulations, their hotly-anticipated but immediately disappointing sophomore release. Sold out crowds were showing up at MGMT’s live performances with huge chips on their shoulders, just waiting for something to pounce on. I mean, shit. You’d think they were Kings of Leon or something, golden boys to whipping boys in no time.

Truthfully, all of the heated conversation surrounding the band makes me wonder what would it have been like if MGMT made the record they “should” have?

I guess it’s time to pretend.

From the beginning, we all expected MGMT’s sophomore release to be produced. And by produced, I mean we expected it to sound as fucking clean as a Coldplay record. Every song would’ve played out like Kids with heavy electronic kicks, but this time they’d be sprinkled with hi-tech synthesizers instead of canned MicroKorg sounds that filled the A-side of Oracular Spectacular. The melodies would be simple enough for a bro to love, but the lyrics would say something profound about living a sheltered life in the suburbs. They would have beat Arcade Fire to the punch. 

Because when it comes down to it, MGMT is hip and being hip means saying something amazing that sounds unimportant at first glance, right? The shows would turn into these crazy X-fueled dayglo raves where girls would fall in love with guys who had long hair and “beards.” Woodstock-fucking-meaningful. Every night. More face paint. More riding motorcycles to the moon. Etc.

Best year of Ricky Jaen’s life. Hands down. ;)

But none of it happened. That record was never made. 2010 was not the party it could have been. There was no dayglo. There was no rave-love. Ricky had to settle for sober girls ackin like they’re drunk.

So what actually happened? What kind of record could have brought us to this post-apocolyptic scene that is MGMT’s career in the second decade? Perhaps a better question might be, did anyone actually listen to Congratulations?

Well, yes. I did. 

And it’s fucking great.

This idea that I can’t seem to shake from my head, that “MGMT’s newest album is actually one of the most engrossing collections of modern psychedelia I’ve ever heard,” feels like a thought someone embedded there… while I was asleep… through an elaborate structure of dreams within dreams. 

It seems completely counterintuitive to the general negativity surrounding Congratulation’s reception, but there has been no album this year more evangelized by me than this one. And furthermore, the ownership I feel towards this collection of songs feels extremely purposeful, like the band hoped for this kind of relationship between the music and the listener.

Let me continue with that thought. MGMT was VERY purposeful about this record. It is divisive, something that could be seen as one of its negative characteristics, but from a utilitarian standpoint, the end that results in Congratulations is definitely worth the gentle persuasion that occurs on almost every track. This is not to say that the band is calling for everyone to be reductionists and mold everything down to the destination arrived. The journey is definitely important.

So important that a lot of patient people never even see the resolution hidden throughout. A lot of really patient people who listen to this record will be frustrated and move on to a number of super obvious cuts from 2010 that, while pretty great, take as little patience to pick up as they do to throw away (see Sleigh Bells, Best Coast, Wavves, Surfer Blood).

Speaking of those bands and the trend art in that vein, the success of MGMT’s newest release was made unlikely, in part, by a current popular music culture that, through a number of economic and social strains caused by worldwide recession and the subsequent retreat to safety and conservatism, has exalted the “literal” and shunned the “metaphorical.” Songs about people’s cats, smoking pot, hanging out a bars, and surfing are the bread and butter of the last two years. 

And the truth is, Congratulations is about all of those things. But unfortunately for their delicate reputations, the band never comes out and says it forthright. Instead, they lead the listener down a corridor filled with strange doors that sometimes lead to nothing and sometimes lead to whole other maze-like hallways. This is the same feeling I got from older records by The National, a feeling that where I was being lead was a mystery and along the way, there would be a constant flux of personal space and comfort. MGMT all of sudden hit me with a unique ability to create felt spaces in their sound.

Some of this is done with melody, a musical feature that is as spread around on this record as it is monolithic within each song. For example, “Song for Dan Treacy” was a cut I didn’t immediately enjoy, but after wading through strange iterations of winding melodies and eventually coming out the other side with a early rock and roll type of boogie feeling, I couldn’t stop listening to it. I just waited over and over for the feeling the last 45 seconds gave me. I’m serious…dozens of times.

The other way MGMT creates felt spaces is with dramatic changes in mood. Its safe to say that “Siberian Breaks” is in my top three songs of the year, and at over 12 minutes this song is an odyssey in scene changes. From the start, it feels like an ode to the Mamas and the Papas, but then changes to shades of older British pop followed by an extended groove of Quentin Tarrantino-style 70’s western-splotation rock, concluding in a thunder and lightning display of vocals, guitars, and synthesizers. Insane. Live video above.

Maybe this isn’t the production we expected but it sure is produced. Maybe this wasn’t the party we expected (remember dayglo rave…) but we certainly got a haunted teen beach bash. Maybe this wasn’t the literal profundity that we expected, but we sure got something big and special.

For all of these reasons and because Congratulations is the record I am most attached to this year, it has my number two spot.