MGMT

“Congratulations”

9.1/10.0

Key Tracks: “Flash Delirium,” “Congratulations”

In a reactionary effort to avoid a lifetime spent playing sold-out stadiums to hundreds of thousands of adulating fans, MGMT recorded a doozie. “Congratulations” is a nine-track psychedelic mess complete with cryptic overtones that’s sparked debate amongst critics the world over. 2007’s “Oracular Spectacular” earned the duo hailing from Wesleyan University plenty of mass appeal, selling over a million copies thanks to hot singles “Kids,” “Time to Pretend” and “Electric Feel,” though that clearly wasn’t the artists’ aim.

The guys of MGMT are tremendously talented as songwriters, so much so that they earned spots opening for Radiohead and Paul McCartney due to the enormous popularity of songs they never dreamed would crash the pop charts. “Congratulations” is a direct effort concentrated at alienating casual listeners, a tactic artists rarely employ because, well, casual listening tends to generate a lot of income.

That said, few recordings in recent memory have generated as much anticipation as has “Congratulations,” largely thanks to an aggressive multimedia campaign directed by the band’s management (please forgive my punnery). Savvy commanders of the Internets knew about the album ever since the band started blogging about it shortly after the beginning of the new year.

As far as this reviewer can tell, the entire thing lacks a chorus, and Wayne Coyne is likely at fault.

When The Flaming Lips hooked up with MGMT in studio last year to record “Worm Mountain,” one of the former’s best tracks from “Embryonic,” one of last year’s best albums, the latter clearly gleaned a template upon which they went about recording. “Congratulations” and “Embryonic” both listen as morbid, cryptic and unrestrained, lacking traditional song structure and instrumental roles.

But they also listen as complete records. From opening song “It’s Working” to the finishing title track, the band pushes through at a beautiful ebb and flow pace, altering vocal effects while spinning a revolving door of funk guitars, synthesizer melodies and acid-drip, muscular bass lines. Every here and there, it pauses a moment to exhibit a clarinet solo or build on a rhythm, as it does to breakneck pace at the end of “Flash Delirium,” the album’s most frenetic and terrifying moment, before being replaced by an organist’s take on the campfire song “I Found A Whistle,” where its imagery gets creepiest. “Such conviction/to paint all the walls with the blood/of the young and the faithful and the good,” VanWyngarden offers over a serenading wall of sound.

If you find yourself with a free 12 minutes sometime soon, give the album’s anchor, the lengthy “Siberian Breaks” a listen. It alternates in pace and style often enough that they could have probably broken it up into a handful of songs, and the lyrics are consistently difficult to understand.

It’s further evidence of its wish to confuse casual listeners of the more straightforward tracks like the anthemic “Time to Pretend” and dancey “Electric Feel” from “Oracular Spectacular.”

To cap it off, the electric tricksters save their least-elaborate track, “Congratulations” for the end of the album, just after the instrumental “Lady Dada’s Nightmare.” It’s a pleasantly morbid cap on a pleasantly morbid record, one that’s consistent from start to finish.

True fans fascinated by its strangeness ought to find it massively enjoyable and also find encouragement in the band’s creative range.

If Goldwasser and VanWyngarden figure out how to combine “Oracular Spectacular”’s pop sensibilities with their enormous free-form creativity on “Congratulations,” then their next album could well be labeled a modern classic.

Dr. Dog

“Shame, Shame”

8.8/10.0

Key Tracks: “Shadow People,” “Shame, Shame”

Toby Leaman and Scott McMicken have discovered some futuristic mechanism to distill and bottle pure charm. The alternating lead singers for Philadelphia-based indie pop band Dr. Dog have apparently been chugging away at its particular batch of brew for just over a decade now, and the result is “Shame, Shame,” its seventh studio album.

Of 11 terrific tracks (13 if you buy it on vinyl!), “Shame, Shame” lacks something that constitutes the bulk of most records these days: filler. A rigorous listening reveals it’s without a throwaway or rushed track or maybe something that didn’t get developed in time for the release. The credit goes to their adherence to genre. American indie pop was born out of the catchiest and most creative Beach Boys songs, most notably from the album “Pet Sounds” which registers the longest track at a mere three minutes and six seconds. Why fix what’s not broken?

But into an album lasting just under 40 minutes, Dr. Dog packs a lot. It ranges from lazy psychedelia (“I Only Wear Blue”) to straight-up cymbals-crashing rock and roll (“Where’d All The Time Go?”) and pure pop (“Jackie Wants a Black Eye”) before riding off into the sunset with the title track.

The band immediately endears itself to its listening audience with the happy horns, cooing and handclapping of “Strangers” and Leaman’s lyrical claim that there aren’t any more tricks up his sleeve, though that certainly can’t be said about the band’s songwriting prowess. Flip on “Station” to hear McMicken give a convincing audition to sing for The Band, somewhere between Levon Helm’s country swagger and Richard Manuel’s gentle falsetto.

The album’s greatest strength is the bare-all attitude in Leaman and McMicken’s songwriting. “I used to suffer alone,” the former sings on “Shame, Shame”. “I used to write it all down, hoping someone would read it years from now/ I used to act like I was in a movie, so mysterious and misunderstood.” Even for happy pop, such darker experience is the best stuff for great songwriting (see the eternal example of this in “God Only Knows” from “Pet Sounds”). You can’t rise to the top without starting at the bottom.

“Shadow People” tells a cute story about McMicken’s life in west Philadelphia with all the “crazy, flamboyant characters and a lot of porch life and coffee shops,” as he told Express Night Out in a recent interview. It’s his “Penny Lane,” and it’s absolutely gorgeous, an early highlight on a record packed full of them.