Vampire Weekend
Vampire Weekend
Here is a list of pretentious/annoying words or phrases in
the order they appear on Vampire Weekend’s debut album: Mansard roof, salty message, eaves, “The
Argentines collapse in defeat,” admiralty, remnants, nautically-mapped sheet,
Oxford comma, English drama, “diction dripping with disdain,” dharamsala, lama,
Lil’ Jon, “Know your butler,” United Nations, Johanna, Hudson River, His
Honor’s finger, lilywhite, Sloan-Kettering, exotica, Pueblo huts, New Mexico, turquoise
harmonicas, Washington Heights, Louis Vuitton, reggaeton, linens, Peter
Gabriel, Bennetton, factory line, Pollination yellow cab, French kids, “See the
Buddha on the second floor,” Coronation rickshaw grab, racist dreams, callous,
bleeding madras, Khyber pass, Jackson Crowter, arch of glass, “Spilled kefir on
your keffiyah,” “Ion displacement won’t work in the basement,” heartland,
westerly motion, Kansas-born beetle, Occident, English Breakfast, Darjeeling,
Blake, Old San Juan, Spanish brownstone, “chairs of leather,” cryptographs,
collegiate grief, dowdy, “Absolute horror!,” “You’ve been checking on my facts/
And I admit I have been lax,” double-screening, protocol, Cape Cod, Mystic
Seaport, Bottleneck, Hyannisport, The Lobster’s Claw, The Holy Roman Empire,
Wellfleet, Provincetown, devastating backstroke, cufflinks, shirtsleeved, pure
Egyptian Cotton.
You don’t have to work very hard to find something
off-putting about Vampire Weekend.
Everything they say about the band is true: They ARE hyper-pretentious, boat
shoe-wearing, pink alligator shirt collar-popping, Columbia University preps who
crib African music styles with impunity.
Furthermore, they appear to play up those very aspects of themselves for
“image” purposes. They fumble with lyrics
that may secretly mean nothing to them.
They write flimsy pop songs about obscure forms of punctuation. They
play rhythms that sound like ska, for
Christ’s sake.
So fucking what. Vampire Weekend brims over with life,
ideas and enthusiasm—which is much more than we’ve seen from a start-up indie
rock band in quite some time. They bring
a fresh set of musical ideas to each song, refusing to repeat a single
one. “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” instigates
slow hip shaking with a falsetto yelp of “Do you want to/Like you know I
do?” “M79” rocks a string quartet
playing something resembling a jig. 2008
was a great year for drummers, with Vampire Weekend’s versatile Chris Tomson
standing up with The Dodo’s Logan Kroeber and The Walkmen’s Matt Barrick as one
of the best, giving an arena-ready (or at least outdoor festival-ready) pomp to
otherwise laid-back tunes. Lyricist/Vocalist
Ezra Koenig (who, if you’re searching for credibility, used to play saxophone
for The Dirty Projectors) writes with a fascination for language, more
interested in consonance and assonance than meaning—his vocabulary just happens
to be nicked from a history major’s textbooks.
He applies each of those pretentious/annoying words and phrases to the
most gorgeous collection of rock melodies on any album this year.
Most of all, Vampire Weekend simply sounds excited to be making music, and each of their songs radiates joy in both its creation and execution. That may be a turn-off for some, but no matter. Whether you’re hip to it or not, Vampire Weekend reminds you what a rare quality excitement truly is. Perhaps that’s what makes them so beguilingly divisive. An overtly pretentious band that doesn’t take itself too seriously—what the fuck are we supposed to do with that?
-Martin Brown, 2008
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