You think you know someone, then along comes their sophomore year.

It all began like a bad Disney movie: a couple of Brooklyn freshmen kids, Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden, sitting around their Wesleyan University dorm room dropping LSD and shootin’ the shit about their favourite jams. “We weren’t [even] trying to start a band », remarked  Goldwasser, but what started out as a few laced-out jam sesh’s eventually blossomed into something much more strange. After being signed by Columbia Records and opening for such indie rock titans as Of Montreal, The Flaming Lips and Radiohead, these two psychedelic, electronic, noise-rock aficionados who started off under the title of ‘The Management’ (before realizing the name was already taken), began pumping out the type of genre-bending, pot-addled, hook happy pop tracks that would light up the airwaves for over three years. Indeed, Oracular Spectacular really did prove something of a spectacle and marked MGMT as the unofficial monolith of mainstream-indie electro-pop music. But like all great rags to riches stories, the heroic aura surrounding the band couldn’t burn on forever. And hell, by all rights, there’s a few tell-tale signs that it was never supposed to.

We all should’ve taken a hint on ‘Time to Pretend’ when Goldwasser (half?) sarcastically mused about how they’d “make some music, make some money, find some models for wives”. I’m sure there was some truth to those aspirations, but it was still laden with just enough indie irony (“I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and f*** with the stars”) to satisfy the hipster skeptics who wanted so badly to believe that these guys really just didn’t give a shit. But that’s the tough thing about populist stardom and fame – what’s perceived as real to some comes off as ‘too weird’ to one end of the spectrum and ‘generic’ to the other. Unlike those hallowed days of the Beatles when good pop music was pretty easily digested by most of the mainstream public, today with such a splintered indie market, it’s near impossible to please everybody with so much of the mainstream running at cross-currents. I guess MGMT must’ve gotten the memo, because on their newest outing, Congratulations, they’ve finally crafted an album that comes down on one side of the fence. The weird one.

To be fair, MGMT – with their glam facepaint and impromptu harpsichord interludes – has always been a tad off-the-wall, but this time around their brand of strange is less ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and more ‘Rock Lobster’. Album opener ‘It’s Working’ tramples into the proceedings with a climbing bassline, loose backbeat jamming and ethereal vocals about dropping ecstacsy, but really never goes anywhere. The song may have been working if I myself had dropped E before listening, but to the unconverted it plays lazy, unmelodic and lacking in any sort of emotional or musical tension whatsoever. This unfortunately, proves the rule for much of the album.

‘Songs for Dan Treacy’ jaunts along with incessantly goofy organ chords like a modern ‘Monster Mash’ (not a compliment) and the equally perplexing homage piece ‘Brian Eno’ channels the atrocious (faux-?)reverence ethos of Aussie wanker Ben Lee’s ‘What Would Jay-Z Do’ and fuses it with a skanky melody that echoes ‘Rock Lobster’ (seriously…not a compliment). Still, the album isn’t entirely without its pleasant surprises: the sweet balladry of ‘Someone’s Missing’ sparkles with an otherwordly melancholic beauty and, after a calculated build-up, crescendoes with ethereal surfer synths that echo yesteryear ‘Electric Feel’. Incidentally, the hauntingly instrumental ‘Lady Dada’s Nightmare’ (which could’ve equally been titled ‘Lady Gaga’s Nightmare’ for how much it betrays mainstream sensibilities) provides perhaps the best glimpse into the sprawling, Flaming Lips-esque psychedelic cinematics that may be in store for MGMT in the years to follow.

These moments, however, are fleeting – for every succinct ‘Someone’s Missing’, Congratulations sports an overwrought, meandering indie-prog opus like ‘Siberian Breaks’. Perpetually trying to strike some elusive balance between My Bloody Valentine shoegaze vocals, Pink Floyd psychedelia and B-52s new-wave schizophrenia, Goldwasser and VanWyngarden’s tour through over three decade of musical influences brings them up short when it comes to wooing the mainstream (and likely most other ’streams’ for that matter). Indeed, if you were among the billions who loved ‘Kids’ and ‘Electric Feel’, this album will likely disappoint and frustrate in equal measures.

That being said, this album wasn’t written for you. Congratulations isn’t a victory lap, nor some sophomore slump on the way to a healthy mainstream recovery – these Brooklyn boys are addicted to the wackness and I’d wager that they have no intention of going clean. To quote the band from a comment made on their website following the release of Congratulations, “We’re not going to buy into any sort of spin, like we’ve turned from an electro-pop duo into a psychedelic rock band, because we feel like we always were a psychedelic rock band and we never were an electro-pop duo.” Touche salesman.

So I guess those of you hipster kids who aren’t cowering in a corner, reeling from the violent rape of your expectations for this album can at least extend a guarded congratulations to a band who, not unlike their psychedelic rock mentors, The Flaming Lips, has recently dared to give a big ‘f*** you’ to the mainstream and write the kind of whacked out fringe fodder that their core psychedelic rock fans always wet dreamed of. For all the rest of you, I’m confident that Empire of the Sun will be coming out with a new album sometime in the next few years.

61/100