So here’s the deal with Vampire Weekend: we didn’t like their first album very much. But NOT because we were hating on them for “stealing” African music. Sure, we tend to favor actual Africans playing their own music, not Columbia grads in pastels and Polo shirts…but hey, why SHOULDN’T a band of eager young people be influenced by some of the best music in the world?
We don’t buy the notion that they should have to beg for cred points just to incorporate South African and Congolese and Nigerian melodies and beats. Just go with whatever comes into your head, man, and make it sound pretty, or cool, or whatever. After all, pop music is a game of controlled stealing, and if it works, it works, right? But we didn’t really think that first album worked at all; the songs seemed kind of limp and bloodless, and the narratives were jumbled and substituted “cute” for “clever.” In fact, the indie love rankled us a bit until we figured it out–every decade needs its own Haircut 100, and these guys fit the suit.
Yet hope springs eternal, and we listened to Contra with the idea that we’d be at least be able to be super-snarky about how much it sucks, haha “sophomore slump” lol, and so on. You know us, sharks smell blood in the water, etc. And the overly adorable opening track, “Horchata,” certainly doesn’t help their case any, bouncing in an expected “Gumboots” bounce and throwing vocabulary words around like Rip Taylor threw confetti in the 1970s. But just as we got our poison pen ready, VW crosses us up by dropping everything and tossing in an insane little ol’ string breakdown that gets crazier and fancier the more it continues. It’s the classic bait and switch, and it works great here, certainly grabbier and more interesting than when they were just starting out.
And that’s how the thing continues, from hyper-perky surf-and-ska-influenced blasts such “Cousins” and “Holiday” all the way to the spookier and more considered songs toward the end of the record. “Diplomat’s Son” is reggaetón without the attack, doo-wop without the honesty, and a character study that keeps us at arm’s length from both the character and the narrator. The ending track, “I Think Ur a Contra,” floats in a rarified Brian Eno spacedub soup while some township guitars rattle around the sides of the pot and Ezra Koenig spins a story that manages to be both your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine and evocative.
There are some new tricks here, too. “White Sky” tosses up a synth line that has “early Eurythmics” written all over it, which then hides in a pan-African polyphony but never quite goes away. “Giving Up the Gun” has a little Big Country fixation, and “Taxi Cab” goes straight for the listener’s brain: “In the shadow of your first attack / I was questioning ‘No Looking Back’ / You said ‘Baby we don’t speak of that’ / Like a real aristocrat.” Wow.
Again, these are all encouraging signs from a young band. We ain’t doing backflips yet; they’re still better for dorm room arguments than for fun gangster parties, and Koenig needs to lose his thesaurus for a few months. But we don’t dismiss them anymore, as it looks like they might have some classics in them, after all. Not here, mind you. But eventually. And it’s going to be interesting to see how they get there.
