Available on: XL LP
It has only been two years since Vampire Weekend sauntered out of the quad and into public consciousness with their chinos and preppy, peppy take on indied-down, dumbed up afro-pop. However, since then we’ve seen moneyed confidence normalised – see the Barbours and boat shoes holding sway in Dalston – taking the edge off the affront to hackneyed rock and roll myth that Vampire Weekend once presented. Now ‘Horchata’, the lead single and opener of second album Contra seems too self-conscious, crippled by Ezra Koenig’s obfuscatory lyrics about rice wine and balaclavas that verges on self-parody. Musically though, the precise xylophones and mbanqua precision that makes guitars sound like keyboards and Graceland references slip out of people’s mouths like it was clever, is no less intriguing for being predictable.
It’s this ability to inject their music with sounds sourced from outside the usual reference points that have kept Vampire Weekend an interesting proposition well into their second full length. There’s mariachi brass and thick European sounding synthesizers on ‘Run’; the bolting assault of ‘Cousins’ which channels the thrashing rush of punk with the polyrhythms of South Africa’s musical exports. Hell, even AutoTune, its application notably unoriginal and cliched, is somehow used in an original and uncliched way on ‘California English’, peaking and trough-ing Ezra Koennig’s vocal around spikey stop-start polyrhythms as oaken strings pick up the slack.
The problem is the almost perverse level of taste and politeness that haunts the execution. The newfound emotional depth that haunts the baroque harpsichords of ‘Taxi Cab’ is hindered rather than helped by than the contrived clack-clack of a tacked-on drum machine. Likewise, the band could have pulled a Kid A and people would have still banged on about the Ivy League bollocks, so the choice of steel flipping pans in ‘Horchata’ seems like they’re goading the haters. More seriously, even though ‘Diplomat Son’ kicks off with taut, electronic squelches and snatches of sampled world music that feel closer to M.I.A than ‘Mansard Roof’, it rolls on and on for six losing itself in a pool of grey sounding stylistic ennui, and that’s troubling.
The fact remains that Vampire Weekend are a unique and important band by virtue of being everything that a band shouldn’t be, and, crucially, playing up to it. However, Contra is like the vacant-looking blonde girl in Ralph Lauren that adorns the front cover; interesting on one level but after a while those studied postures, for the first time, seem disappointingly shallow.
It has only been two years since Vampire Weekend sauntered out of the quad and into public consciousness with their chinos and preppy, peppy take on indied-down, dumbed up afro-pop. However, since then we’ve seen moneyed confidence normalised – see the Barbours and boat shoes holding sway in Dalston – taking the edge off the affront to hackneyed rock and roll myth that Vampire Weekend once presented. Now ‘Horchata’, the lead single and opener of second album Contra seems too self-conscious, crippled by Ezra Koenig’s obfuscatory lyrics about rice wine and balaclavas that verges on self-parody. Musically though, the precise xylophones and mbanqua precision that makes guitars sound like keyboards and Graceland references slip out of people’s mouths like it was clever, is no less intriguing for being predictable.
It’s this ability to inject their music with sounds sourced from outside the usual reference points that have kept Vampire Weekend an interesting proposition well into their second full length. There’s mariachi brass and thick European sounding synthesizers on ‘Run’; the bolting assault of ‘Cousins’ which channels the thrashing rush of punk with the polyrhythms of South Africa’s musical exports. Hell, even AutoTune, its application notably unoriginal and cliched, is somehow used in an original and uncliched way on ‘California English’, peaking and trough-ing Ezra Koennig’s vocal around spikey stop-start polyrhythms as oaken strings pick up the slack.
The problem is the almost perverse level of taste and politeness that haunts the execution. The newfound emotional depth that haunts the baroque harpsichords of ‘Taxi Cab’ is hindered rather than helped by than the contrived clack-clack of a tacked-on drum machine. Likewise, the band could have pulled a Kid A and people would have still banged on about the Ivy League bollocks, so the choice of steel flipping pans in ‘Horchata’ seems like they’re goading the haters. More seriously, even though ‘Diplomat Son’ kicks off with taut, electronic squelches and snatches of sampled world music that feel closer to M.I.A than ‘Mansard Roof’, it rolls on and on for six losing itself in a pool of grey sounding stylistic ennui, and that’s troubling.
The fact remains that Vampire Weekend are a unique and important band by virtue of being everything that a band shouldn’t be, and, crucially, playing up to it. However, Contra is like the vacant-looking blonde girl in Ralph Lauren that adorns the front cover; interesting on one level but after a while those studied postures, for the first time, seem disappointingly shallow.
Louise Brailey
More from
