Vampire Weekend
Contra
(XL/Remote Control)
Has the dust settled yet around Vampire Weekend’s second album? It’s topped the U.S. album charts, gone gold here in Australia, and snagged the band’s second Best New Music on Pitchfork. True to its title,
Contra has also relit the global war of words over an indie band that dares to wear boat shoes and polo shirts instead of beards and flannel. Recent interviews have forced the band’s members into defensive positions, having committed a rare trifecta of sins: they are, after all, an American band touching on class issues in song, a white band influenced by African music, and as Alice Cooper so shrewdly observed, a “wimpy” band with no “balls.” To add insult to injury, they formed at an Ivy League college in New York City and hijacked an ominous band name that would have gone to much greater use on the Hot Topic circuit.
How terribly
un-rock-and-roll of them. Rock is about
rebellion, about sold-out arenas flooded with beer and testosterone, about brandishing a band shirt that will shock your parents into an early grave. Even in indie rock, a supposed escape from the industry-perpetuating clichés of the last sentence, today bands are expected to grow their hair long, douse their vocals in dreamy reverb, and sing epic hymns to the spirit of the great forest. That, or disappear down a rabbit hole of laptop psychedelia. So to have Vampire Weekend come along and enunciate clearly about balaclavas, Oxford commas, Mansard roofs, Peter Gabriel, and the women of liberal-arts colleges is nothing less than heresy.
It was the Internet that turned Vampire Weekend from a brief spark of buzz to an overnight brand, and it was the Internet that tried to bring down the band when it got too big for its britches. Which is to say immediately. Vampire Weekend’s self-titled 2008 debut has now sold just about half a million copies, and people spent most of that year debating the band’s worth. As is often the case with conventional wisdom, one person said one thing and everyone else ran with it; in the case that the band lifted wholesale not from the African music alluded to in the song title ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’ but from another white man’s approximation of African music: Paul Simon’s Grammy-winning 1986 masterpiece
Graceland. In other words, it had been done before and can never – ever – be attempted again. As for the Nautica products adorning the members’ persons and the esoteric terms peppering frontman Ezra Koenig lyrics, well, that’s just smarmy.
Bullshit, of course. All of it. There should be a band – and a movie and book and piece of art, etc. – for every emotion or thought that could possibly run through a human being. Which is a long way of saying that an ostensibly preppy band is not the end of the world. In fact, Vampire Weekend’s crossover success proves the existence of a market that sorely needed cornering. But none of this debunking would amount to much if Vampire Weekend hadn’t made two infectious, sophisticated, and already enduring albums that stand with the best pop music in the past decade.
Vampire Weekend and
Contra are each the kind of record where your favourite song on it changes at least daily – it’s its own best competition – and which allow the listener’s appreciation to actually mature and grow with time. And I’m happy to report that
Contra is even better than its table-setting predecessor.
The vocals are bratty and breezy and the lyrics sharp and arch on both, but where
Contra ups the ante is in the music. In a word, it’s three-dimensional, bringing a roundness of influences and tricks that the first album didn’t have. From the hip-hop snap of ‘Giving Up The Gun’ to the vocoder of the lead single ‘California English’ to the M.I.A. sample and vocal harmonies of the six-minute ‘Diplomat’s Son’, there are so many tiny touches to savour. Though there’s the same affectionate jumble of Afropop and New Wave in Koenig’s stuttered, jerky guitar lines, the keyboards – including tasteful synth strings – and rhythms have become subtler and more diverse. Not only do the songs themselves get under your skin, but so too the lustrous, uncluttered production of keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij, who also helmed the first album.
Now about those lyrics. They should be cause not to cringe but to incite comparison to the Kinks’ mastermind Ray Davies, who similarly mulled the intricacies and absurdities of class and culture from a deadpan remove. There are other Kinks earmarks in Vampire Weekend, though they might be more familiar from the intervening Wes Anderson soundtracks, which have used prime Kinks tunes and several Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo) pieces that seem inspired by the Kinks’ more flowery instrumentation. Vampire Weekend’s own faux-stately twinkling of keys echoes several tracks on the Kinks’ 1966 classic 'Face To Face'. Moreover, Davies’ lyrical concerns on 'Face To Face' foreshadow Koenig’s remarkably, from ‘House In The Country’ (
“He’s got a house in the country / And a big sports car / And he’s oh so smug”) and ‘Most Exclusive Residence For Sale’ (
“He spent it all on girls and fancy jewellry”) to ‘Sunny Afternoon’ (
“And I love to live so pleasantly / Live this life of luxury”) and ‘Rosie Won’t You Please Come Home’ (
“Since you’ve joined the upper classes / You don’t know us anymore”).
But in the here and now, Vampire Weekend’s take on approximately the same themes are seen as something like open-air wish fulfillment. That it’s satire is unquestionable; that it’s not widely interpreted as such – although the Kinks rightly are – is bewildering. Even seasoned U.S. rock critic Jessica Hopper
mocks the band’s use of satire for not being distinguishable enough: “Maybe the fact that so few people can tell the difference between their supposed lampooning of affluence and genuine fascination with it is a sign that they need to sharpen their game.” (
Link) Of course the two aren’t mutually exclusive: who would bother satirising something that doesn’t fascinate them? What better to make a value judgment on than something – in this case casual wealth, Ivy League education, good breeding, and other supposed fruits of the elite – that has tempted, enthralled, and vexed society throughout history?
Look at that: I’ve been put on the defensive, simply by virtue of loving a band that the world demands everyone take a side on.
Contra is smart, fun, bold, and surprising. And yes, it goes down easy. If you encounter any other bands cursed with those damning traits, be kind enough to send them my way. Cheers.
Doug Wallen