Title: Vampire WeekendArtist: Vampire Weekend
Year: 2008
Label: XL Recordings
Discussing Vampire Weekend within the context of the 2000s is tough, given the speed with which they've burst onto the scene and dominated these past few years. Vampire Weekend isn't the most recent debut album on this list, but it's certainly the most unique, given that its sound doesn't fit neatly into other established musical genres. Now, in case you've been kept in solitary confinement for the past three years, here's the party line on Vampire Weekend: four preppy Columbia University grads decided to mix elements of African pop music with thin, trebly guitar pop, reinvigorating alternative rock in the process and all but drowning in the sheer amount of critical acclaim drooled all over their debut album. That's supposedly the whole story on the band, but digging into this album reveals some more intriguing questions. In the short span since it has been released, Vampire Weekend has begun to reveal itself as a recording that lives up to some of the hype surrounding it, while falling short elsewhere.
A lot has been written about the atmosphere of wealth and entitlement that hangs over everything Vampire Weekend have recorded. Certainly, the band's lyrics, instrumentation and overall presentation does reveal their upstanding, college-educated roots. The references to Cape Cod and the band's penchant for polo shirts help, too. Yet, the songs don't deal with class politics in any meaningful way, rendering much of the hand-wringing about wealth somewhat moot. The high-brow references scattered throughout the lyrics don't feel pretentious, although they can feel quite random at times. This ties into Vampire Weekend's biggest weakness: their desire to be witty. The snarky name-dropping of Lil John ("Oxford Comma") and Peter Gabriel ("Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa") do virtually nothing for these songs beyond evoking a few giggles among the star-struck hipsters. Verses tend too far towards non sequiturs, eventually sounding like a bunch of words the band thought sounded cool rather than a coherent whole. In fact, as infectious as the singles off this album are ("A-Punk" was the ringtone of choice at my college for a while there), they don't really seem to be about anything whatsoever.
Which is where the album's second half comes in. Relatively neglected in the critical ink-slinging upon the album's original release, songs like "I Stand Corrected" and "Bryn" blow the assorted singles out of water from a lyrical perspective. Dealing in real, human emotions instead of winking irony, these later songs utilize the band's minimal, clean sound to create lean, well-crafted nuggets of relatable guitar pop. Producer/multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij seems to have an innate ability to keep things perfectly restrained, allowing squiggles of keyboard or quick snare hits to add flavor without taking up much space. The scattered cello throughout the album is unexpected and often quite pleasing. Not sure I can say the same about the harpsichord on "M79," but even that doesn't dominate too badly. "One (Blake's Got A New Face)" even works in the fantastic lyrical barb "oh, your collegiate grief has left you dowdy in sweatshirts, absolute horror!" It's this moments that reveal what Vampire Weekend is truly capable of as a band. They just happen to also be the moments that aren't as popular.
Vampire Weekend have proven themselves to be deeply polarizing. The manic flood of acclaim thrown at their debut album elicited an equal (if not greater) backlash, which I myself was part of at one point in time. The band's sophomore album, Contra, released just this January, ended up silencing some of those haters, but not through even more ironic hipster-baiting. Contra has succeeded because it's ratio of honesty-to-snark was much higher than Vampire Weekend's. Of course, there are still plenty of fans out there who want more songs that sarcastically reference crunk hits, but you'll notice that they aren't complaining about Contra either. At the end of the day, it's important to remember that Vampire Weekend are a very young band. They play music appropriate for youth and summer and fun, reflecting their own experience as people who enjoy all three of those things. Vampire Weekend isn't the mature, indie-rock masterpiece critics tried to will it into being once upon a time, but that doesn't mean it's beyond merit.
Next up on The New Classics: Boxer, The National
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