I’ve been putting off writing about Vampire Weekend and it’s not because I don’t love it. I do. It is the album that finally brought in the 2000s. Indie rock has been about Vampire Weekend ever since it was released nearly to years ago. And it is easy to love the melodic, quick, first born of Graceland album.
But it feels too light and airy for all the weight put on it. It isn’t like Arcade Fire’s Funeral – VE is a sunny day in NYC type album, it has the snappy ease and smartaleckiness of Paul Simon’s first solo album -a floar in sound, one moment it’s at the dorms in Columbia, the next moment he is on campus watching a lost love walk by or on a bus, “very near here” as lead singer Ezra Koenig noted at an outddor concert in Central Pak a coupla years ago.
“Upper Westside Soweto” is the claim but despite its uniqueness of sound there hasn’t been much copying, not many attempts to replicate the sound by other bands. VE’s influence has been more like the first wave of New York punk bands in the mid-1970s: nobody sounded like each other, but they shared similar youthfulness, lived near each other, knew it other.
Since VE’s album in January 2008 there has been a groundswill of sound: not just the Brooklyn scene but wider, deeper, a certain cleverness and consistency in musical attack, the Dirty Projectors, Tune-Yard school of multi-cultural East Coast Collegiate wiseguyness.
Brooklyn got lucky VE were the standard bearer for the scene, VE’s charm, their ease, their preponderance on melodic, all of these made everybody elses entrance into the mainstream much easier.
This makes it sound like I didn’t love the album in its own rights. And I did love it in its own right. Listen to Kid cudi’s sample of “Ottomon” on “Cuddersback” and you will see precisely one thing I love about the rhyhm. It is all syncopated half beats falling where you least expect em and Cudi, in one of his finest vocal performances, seems to hit is accent right on the slip of the shifty rhythm. Those shifting rhythms (if you listen,sometimes Chris tomson appears to be playing in triple time -all these fast beats between the main beat.
But the reason why if it wasn’t for its cultural importance it might not have made my best of the decade and this is because for all its cleverness it is a bit distant. It is as if not its smartness means that the deepest emotions float thru the songs: you need to dig too hard. The result can be seen in Vampire Weekend’s on stage performance which is way too mannered for its own good.
Still, everything I’ve heard off Contra has been awesome and I am eagerly awaiting the concert in January. And it did make my top ten of the decade so there.