Vampire Weekend

I know, I know. I'm pretty much late by a year (at least) in discovering this band, but heck I have done it finally, and I can't stop raving about them. Here's a version of my review of their eponymous debut album for BT More.

Vampire Weekend- Vampire Weekend

Imagine a Wes Anderson film, say The Darjeeling Limited. Now take the artifice and detail of that movie and turn it into music. It will probably sound like Vampire Weekend, 2008’s biggest phenomenon. The New York foursome make music that many call “Indie Afro-Pop”- the band itself calls it “Upper West Side Soweto” like true Frat brats- and yet this is a misleading term. Vampire Weekend’s songs are primarily meticulously crafted pop songs with irresistible melodies and smart, quirky lyrics.

The Africana touch is there- in the infectious beat of songs like Mansard Roof or the clean guitar lines Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa or Oxford Comma. But important as these elements are, the much hyped African link is but one of several equally important influences. Principal among these are the ringing Indie guitars on ditties like A-Punk and Campus and a fondness for designing elaborate soundscapes over simple songs. Add to that the complexity of their shifts in pace and rhythm and occasional swooning string and flute arrangements-Mansard Roof, The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance- and you get a post-modern baroque pop band par excellence. On the affecting love song Bryn, they take an Irish refrain, and marry it to African beats to great effect. As singer and guitar player Ezra Koenig confessed in Spin magazine about critics leveling charges of cultural appropriation against them, “…that debate has already happened. We’re in a context that’s coming after instances of people actually stealing from each other.” Yes they pay as much attention to their music as to post colonial theory, pore over gestalt and zeitgeist and the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, but all that preciousness does not rob their music of authenticity.

Then there are the lyrics. Maybe no other band in recent times has evoked university life as cheekily as Vampire Weekend does on the album. It is true that the university they are talking about is the Ivy League Columbia University, but some things resonate, like the snotty brashness of an English major scoffing at the stiff upper lip accents of the Queen’s English in Oxford Comma. Or in the song Campus, where Koenig’s boyish voice brilliantly evokes a crush on a professor, “Then I see you, you're walking cross the campus, cruel professor studying romances. How am I supposed to pretend I never want to see you again?” The band is preppy to a fault, right down to Louis Vuitton accessories (there’s the Wes Anderson touch again) and pairing cardigans with a tie but their songs have real soul.