CD of the week - MGMT: Congratulations

• MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, in helmet and specs, with bandmates Matthew Asti, James Richardson and Will Berman

SUBSEQUENT to its release in January 2008, MGMTs debut album Oracular Spectacular went on to vacuum up impressive-sounding accolades in a manner befitting New York's most hyped band of the moment. The NME called it the best album of the year. By the end of 2009, Rolling Stone followed up such gushing with a doubtless important but not nearly as catchy positioning of the record as the 18th best of the decade.

All of which critical thumbs-uppery has conspired to give this follow-up the added weight of being "eagerly awaited", or perhaps even "hotly anticipated".

Yet it feels fair to say there was an element of the emperor's new clothes about that first record. It was pretty good, but its reputation has been built on the quality of three outstanding singles (Time to Pretend, Electric Feel and Kids) and the production of Dave Fridmann, whose work with Flaming Lips and his former bandmates in Mercury Rev, among many others, has demonstrated his ability to wrap an album in a particularly magical audio lustre.

There was a certain naivety about parts of Oracular Spectacular, a playground aspect to some of the lyrics and compositions, which suggested MGMT would bring us a denser concentrations of special music as their sound matured. Yet, as the children of hippy parents, it may not have been entirely unexpected that Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser would dismiss convention and go the other way entirely.

By accepted standards, Congratulations appears to be a rejection of every accepted norm which comes with the pop industry's expectation of hits, hits, hits. There will apparently be no singles released from the album, which the band have attributed to a purist desire for the days when fans would listen to an artist's entire new body of work rather than pick their favourites and download them. The appointment of producer Pete Kember, a seminal figure when he founded proto-shoegazers Spacemen 3 under the alias Sonic Boom but hardly a name associated with box-office gold, also seems like a wilfully contrary act.

In many respects the opening Its Working sounds like a new band, the main one being its overwhelmingly analogue sound. Rich, echoing drums rattle in the background, the floating vocal part bouncing pointedly paranoid lyrics about striking matches in a forest of lies across a noisy jangle of guitars. It's the toytown psychedelia of very early Pink Floyd mixed with the frantic pace of 13th Floor Elevators: what pop music might have sounded like had punk never existed, in other words.

Possibly the heavily Estuary-accented vocal on Song For Dan Treacy, a tribute to the fulcrum of English punk-pop outfit Television Personalities, is an attempt to emulate Treacy himself, but it sounds for all the world like Pete Doherty. This song could be a lost Libertines outtake, albeit one featuring the Horrors' Spider Webb interjecting scary movie organ breaks. It's important that these contemporary influences come through early on, because much of the album does enjoy tipping more than a nod and a wink to the glory days of psychedelic UK pop, when groups such as The Kinks and the Small Faces were enjoying either LSD itself or its effect on the culture around them.

What sounds distinctly like a sitar twangs out from the almost throwaway Someone's Missing, and the listener might agree with the "I think I'm smoking something too strong" line. Flash Delirium, released as a downloadable taster for the album, is perhaps one of Congratulations' most focused songs, albeit probably the only track you'll hear this year with a flute-led instrumental midway through, while the theremin-aided swirl of I Found a Whistle revels in lyrical non-sequiturs such as "hey, I found a whistle/ that works every time/ that's when the trail escapes/ and the flood erases the crime". All of which sounds a little unfathomable and deeply unfashionable in this decade.

Working to these songs' advantage, though, is an innate, almost unconscious facility for pop composition. Siberian Breaks opens on a beautiful approximation of the summery West Coast sound appropriated by the Byrds, before fragmenting into an exercise in Syd Barrett whimsy, while Brian Eno is perhaps more accurately influenced by the jazz leanings of early Genesis.

Only at one point does the record tip over into self-indulgence: the light, piano-led instrumental Lady Dada's Nightmare. Right after that, however, comes the most nakedly personal and least affected song here, the closing guitar-ballad title track, which breezily reflects on the lazy confusion and vain desperation of life after fame.

An album without the radio-friendly peaks of its predecessor, this is nevertheless one which builds on what has gone before with a greater consistency.

Hopefully one day it will be viewed as part of a rich back catalogue, although congratulations really will be in order if it comes to be seen as a classic. Which it just might.

• Fiona Shepherd is away