Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend on CD

Description

Who would have thought it? Nobody, that's who. The last time African music enjoyed any meaningful dalliance with the Western mainstream it was under Paul Simon's patronage with his peerless 1986 album Graceland. That's if you don't count Damon Albarn's extra curricular indulgences (which you don't). The last place we expected it to turn up again was from four New York kids who otherwise might have been found fiddling with their fringes in dorm rooms waiting for the Albert Hammond Jr. tour to hit town. Even by the obscure standards US indie has set itself over the last few years (see TV on the Radio and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) Vampire Weekend offer up a witch's brew of audacity. That alone would be sufficient to garner infamy and a rep for experimentation, but they also hang from this rebellion of form a stream of alt-tunefulness so efficient and unabashed it would make The Strokes' first album blush. Thus, the piping reggae organ and sun-kissed swagger of "Oxford Comma" is given a heartbeat by tight lo-fi garage drums and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" lilts along with cheerful tribal rhythms and crisp African guitar, bound by ascending psychedelic vocals. And that's not to mention the mad strings that make listening to "M79" like watching Ski Sunday on hallucinogens. Their advanced rhythmical awareness even makes more standard indie rampages "I Stand Corrected" and "Walcott" less standard. Which is about the length of it; Vampire Weekend, making the standard much less standard. Their sound is really refresh: their mix of rock and afro pop is as unusual as it is exciting different. References from Congolese soukous music meet crashing riffs that would also look good to the strokes. But sometimes they also remember the talking heads during their cosmopolitan phase. In doing so, they develop their very own sound, which pulls the ground under your feet, especially live, and is as multicultural as it is indie. The musicians around singer Ezra König met at Columbia University and found that they all had an undivided love for Paul Simon's Graceland album, and that Spanish pop music was not to be missed on any of their mixtapes. Already after the first appearances, the band became the new favourities in the big wide world of the Internet. Vampire Weekend use a spectrum of sounds for their songs that goes far beyond any kind between genres and unites what was previously not allowed to belong together Review Vampire Weekend are the latest band to unexpectedly defy genre and geographic expectations. Since the turn of the millennium, New York groups have reworked proto-punk sounds popularised by The Velvet Underground (The Strokes, Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, Holy Hail), or rubbery punk-funk (The Rapture, !!!, Radio 4, LCD Soundsystem). But on this remarkable debut the latest NYC hopefuls clearly draw from a far deeper well of influences. The most overt feature of the VW sound is the refreshing adoption of Afrobeat percussion. This alone differentiates the quartet from their peers, but when added to a multitude of nautical references and other, often ambiguous, lyrics about delightfully esoteric subjects, the results are constantly rewarding. What other act would write about punctuation (Oxford Comma), loft conversions (Mansard Roof), the link between rich US college fashions and Victorian British Imperialism (Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa and possibly others)? Only a band with the balls to make a 2008 version of Paul Simon's Graceland, crossed with moments of art-disco cool that namechecks Peter Gabriel, Louis Vuitton, at least two types of English tea and Manhattan bus routes. And that's not counting M79 and The Kids Don't Stand A Chance, whose harpsichords and string sections would be more at home in the court of Louis XIV than a 'rock' album. Some listeners may be utterly baffled by a record including lines like Walcott's "The lobster's claw is sharp as knives/ evil feasts on human lives" and Mansard R

Tracks

Mansard Roof 2.07
Oxford Comma 3.15
A-Punk 2.17
Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa 3.34
M79 4.15
Campus 2.56
Bryn 2.13
One (Blake's Got A New Face) 3.13
I Stand Corrected 2.39
Walcott 3.41
The Kids Don't Stand A Chance 4.03