Vampire Weekend

Mar 05, 2008 - 00:17 AM PST
Vampire Weekend
Vampire Weekend
XR Recordings, 01/08

Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut has a very warm, friendly tone to it, like a loving hug -- and yet, I can't help feeling that the person hugging me has some godawful B.O. This NYC foursome has received some significant buzz regarding their combination of Afro-pop and classical music, along with good ol' American pop.

To be sure, there are elements of classical music -- the opening of "M79" sounds like Bach on a Prozac/Adderall speedball -- but mostly they stick to superimposing Afro-Caribbean sounds on standard pop structures. The arrangements are sparse and precise, as if Spoon had grown up in Mali and then moved to the Caribbean and ate a lot of coconut. Sounds promising, right? Therein lies the problem; there's a lot of promise, but not enough execution. At their heart, VW's songs are middle of the road tunes. There's nothing to provoke immediate scorn, but none of it is terribly compelling, either. Somebody in the studio punched the "make it sound African" button while recording Third Eye Blind and we wound up with Vampire Weekend.

To my ears, the guitar work draws heavily from Senegal's multi-ethnic champions Orchestra Baobab. While Baobab's music is full of movement and spontaneous melody, VW's pop platform seems to prevent them from exuding that same enthusiasm. Excising the liveliness and improvisation from a lively and often improvised genre would seem to defeat the purpose, but perhaps I'm complaining about what this album could be rather than what it is. VW is a very tight band that sounds like a less angry version of The Clash's reggae-inflected work, or the English Beat without the sense of class conflict.

The guitar riff to "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" is super catchy -- in the same way as syphilis; all the fun is in the catching, but unless you get help it will drive you to madness. I'm sure this melody seemed irresistibly cute to the band members upon first hearing it, but as the days passed they must have realized they'd created something hideous from something adorable, like coming home to find your fluffy white puppy caked in its own feces.

Lest you think my interest lies solely in horse-whipping this band something unmerciful, let me mention their most endearing quality -- Ezra Koenig's sly, bizarre lyrics. They're positively cockeyed. "M79" is the first song I've ever encountered which includes a "coronation rickshaw grab." I doubt there are many more. The singer of "Campus" laments how he "spilled kefir on your keffiyah." Not to be outdone, the opening line of "Bryn" asserts that "ion replacement won't work in the basement." Truer words have never been uttered.

Koenig also has an ear for pointed, effective phrasing. Describing a taxi as "pollination yellow" ("M79" is sharp work, and when I heard "your collegiate grief has left you dowdy in sweatshirts" (from "Blake Got a New Face", I felt an all-too-familiar twinge of jealousy at having not written it myself. It's the same feeling I get while reading those Clifford the Big Red Dog books. Damn you, whoever created that gigantic vermillion canine.

A multitude of historical and geographical references pepper the verses. These are inarguably pleasing to the ear -- it's a rare album that mentions the Khyber Pass, New Mexico's Pueblo communities, and the Holy Roman Empire -- but I suspect that these inclusions serve no purpose other than sounding vaguely exotic. To be sure, this pan-cultural name-dropping sounds nifty the first half-dozen times, but putting Dharamsala and Lil' John together ("Oxford Comma" quickly starts to sound a little, well... silly. I had hoped that an act whose calling card is cross-cultural synthesis might have synthesized a bit more culture, and I found myself thinking that I'd like to hear a song that really was about the Khyber Pass. Surely I'm not the only one who's a huge fanboy for songs about the colonial period's most significant Asian trade routes. Tell me you didn't cry the first time you heard "From Jamrud to Torkham the Indo-Aryans Go."

"Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" has the lyric, "But this feels so unnatural / Peter Gabriel too." Including him seems like a preemptive strike against listeners who might hear this fusion of influences and say, "Wait a minute...didn't Peter Gabriel already do this? And Paul Simon?" Thank goodness I'm a total arse, or I might have let that stop me from mentioning it: Didn't Peter Gabriel already do this? And Paul Simon? Name-checking your influences in your lyrics doesn't prevent being called on it. In fact, it's the musical equivalent of "okay, I wrote this in like fifteen minutes, so...be nice."

So Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon did it already, but it's unfair to assert an album is a failure simply because it doesn't do anything new, and I'm not trying to do that here. However, it's worth considering that a significant measure of Vampire Weekend's growing popularity could be due to their target demographic's unfamiliarity with the source material. The appearance of newness has a way of propelling commercial success in a way that tradition never can. I have to wonder how popular the Rolling Stones would have been if English teenagers were already familiar with the likes of Howlin' Wolf and Lightnin' Hopkins. They might have wondered what all those skinny white dudes were doing playing covers of blues masters who were still alive.

That being said, I'm glad Vampire Weekend are around. As often happens with debuts, the first half is stronger than the second; Coldplay fans, name a song from side two of "Parachutes." Light-hearted affairs like this often don't benefit from close examination, but this album is consistently ways thought-provoking, although sometimes for its shortcomings as well as its strengths.







2/26/08

Vampire Weekend


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1 Comments

Mar 28, 2008 - 21:36 PM

dex2988 on
a friend of mine on myspace just declared Vampire Weekend to be the best band ever. Antibalas is in uproar over it.