"Congratulations" is the title track from MGMT's second album, which fully expands on the "Pastoral English pop, flighty mysticism, and studio-rat arrangements" (Scott Plagenhoef, Pitchfork) that underscored the more obscure tracks from their debut album. While critics have mixed reactions to MGMT's abrupt abandonment of the killer hooks that made them famous, most agree that the album is rather uneven and cluttered.
The rest of the album takes time to digest, but the title track proves that lyrical complexity can be paired in a great melody and a delightful soft-rock vibe. Charles Aaron sums up the track's artistic position succintly:
"The closing and title track of MGMT’s second album could be a career coda — a tender acoustic elegy with ornate keyboard sprinkles, and frontman Andrew VanWyngarden playing an arch dandy resigned to a life of half-assed guilt assuaged only by the ministrations of phonies and lackeys. He admits to being “dead in the water,” a blasé narcissist who’d “rather dissolve than have you ignore me.”"
Given the song's lack of the general verse + chorus structure and dense lyricism, it's a wonder that its such an easy listen. VanWyngarden makes a reserved stand for artistic integrity, while fleshing out the ironies and pitfalls of commercial success:
'It's hardly a sink or swimWhen all is well if the ticket sellsOut with a wimperIt's not a blaze of gloryYou look down from your templeAs people endeavor to make it a storyAnd chisel a marble wordBut all is lost if it's never heard
But I've got someone to make reportsThat tell me how my money's spentTo book my stays and draw my blindsSo I can't see what's really thereAnd all I need's a great big congratulations'
Lyrics: Genius
Its seems difficult to sympathize with people who have money, talent and fame, but the track's quiet, understated melancholy makes MGMT's innate uncertainty and anxiety about the merits of their work and life compelling (and this is akin to how the music video made empathy with a suffering 'sickly, alienesque vulture creature' possible):
“I think the album in general is kind of, like, lyrically and musically, a reaction to fame and success. We said that it wasn’t going to be, but then we realized that was impossible, because we were just writing songs that were coming from whatever mindset we were in at the time. And the mindset we were in was post year-and-a-half of touring, chaos, like we had been in a tornado of chaos, so we didn’t really know what to do, so we wrote songs that ended up being about that. But they’re also about that pseudo-mystical … bullsh–.”
Andrew Van Wyngarden, MTV News
