Music Review: Vampire Weekend, “Vampire Weekend” * * * *
Buzz started building around New York quarted Vampire Weekend two years ago, and a few key songs such as “Mansard Roof” and “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” crept into hipster consciousness via MySpace and two EPs, but that does not diminish the freshness of the band’s exhilarating debut. Combining Township Jive rhythms and a cultured, well-bred pop sense with hyper-literate lyrics, “Vampire Weekend” could reset the standards for indie cool.
The first impulse is to call this a love letter to Paul Simon’s “Graceland” — after all, the band even calls its sound “Upper West Side Soweto.” But there’s more to it than four smart kids shuffling through Dad’s old LPs. “Oxford Comma” places a lyric about complicated communication against an irresistible pop hook, while “M79” brings harpsichords and strings into the mix on a song about finding social bearing, sounding like it could be the great missing song from the “Royal Tenenbaums” sound track.
This doesn’t come across as strictly academic — Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig seems interested mainly in pairing great words with uncommonly arranged melodies. “One (Blake’s Got a New Face)” takes a funny lyric (“Oh, your collegiate grief has left you dowdy in sweatshirts, absolute horror”) and drives it home with purloined island rhythms and sunny chanting, yet nothing about it sound contrived or stretching sincerity. The key here is that Vampire Weekend taps into a kind of pop exoticism that few expected and probably even fewer requested. But now that the band is here, it’s hard to imagine not having them around.
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Interesting! Good for them!