Popcraft

Your friends don’t want to hear you talk about a wide variety of topics. They don’t want to hear about why you like Wes Anderson films. They don’t want to hear about your Twitter friends. Today I will talk about one of these topics: why I like Vampire Weekend.

Yeah, that’s right; Your friends don’t want to hear about why you like Vampire Weekend. Why? Because like all the other listed topics, talking about why you like Vampire Weekend makes you look like a douche bag. Even if your friends like Vampire Weekend, something about explaining Vampire Weekend evokes horrible phrases and adjectives like “lush”, “tight”, “valiant”, “bare”, “head bobbing bass”. Let us all just cringe a little bit together before I move on.

Acceptance heralds the last stage of grief, but in music reviewing it’s where we often begin. That in mind, let’s get something out of the way: Vampire Weekend is a very small band who stands on the shoulders of much larger, dare I say gigantic, bands. They’ve made it pretty clear that they are aware of this. When Ezra Koenig calls Tom Petty a “true fucking poet,” that’s Ezra “I name drop the Futura typeface” Koenig being pretty honest about where he falls on the food chain. [ed. Tom Petty is a vegetarian and he would not eat Ezra Koenig or any other mammal regardless of songwriting ability.] When I think about the popular reaction to Vampire Weekend I remember The Strokes. The Strokes were another small band conceptually who just happened to be in the right zeitgeist at the right time. Pop critics heralded them as the new music for young persons while rock historians spat a lot. Vampire Weekend is really similar; to date they have not reshaped how we think about music, but they have got a bunch of kids buying Paul Simon LPs at Goodwill and that’s all we can really ask for.

Contra itself follows a typical album scenario. We build in from track one to peak around track seven and in the end throw in a few slow dances for the couples. As a “sophomore effort” it is more notable as Vampire Weekend’s first cohesive record rather than the eleven potential singles from the self-titled. “Run” will hold your ear the longest and represents the only real anthem on the album. “Cousins”, “White Sky”, “Holiday”, “California English”, and “Diplomat’s Son” (and most likely in that order) will all keep you moving throughout and stop you from turning on iTunes’ brutish repeat track feature.

Verdict: If you can get beyond the fact that you’re listening to a guy name drop fonts, you’re going to find some really enjoyable pop music. But don’t kid yourself, world beat existed well before Ezra and company packed a bowl together at Columbia University. Personally, this album will probably stick around for a few more sunny weekends at least.