Vampire Weekend (2008)

(XL)

RECOMMENDED

Admit this much. no matter how much you love this band: you're asking for trouble if you're a bloghype band on the cover of Spin before your first album release, which contains songs about Cape Cod and, uh, "college." Admit this no matter how much you hate them: catchy and exuberant transcend privilege. For heaven's sake, aren't we all sick of the authenticity conversation by now? It's so damn old-fashioned, and does anyone even remember the point when people sincerely believed that from-the-roots grittiness was the prime qualification for Rocking Out? Vampire Weekend weren't a terribly original fixture when they earwormed their way into the community's consciousness after opening for the Shins and issuing an obnoxious pogoing pseudo-oi! piece called "A-Punk." Their chops weren't faultless (Rostam Batmanglij's keyboard playing is rudimentary at best, even if his production is more assured, and it's unfair how he and Ezra Koenig overshadow the band's more technically proficient rhythm section) and you can see how their Wings-like jam-band-with-pop-songs cutesiness could wear thin on a world of seasoned eye-rollers. But there's a reason that, for all their faults, I think the Shins are one of the best rock bands of the millennium, and I'm now applying the same logic to Vampend Weekire: (a) it's the songs, obviously; (b) those songs are an instantly appealing as any that have come down the guitar-music pike in this decade or the last, and hence the band is vital and immediate and a joy to listen to.

Vampire Weekend is the least of the group's three albums so far, but the one that's exerted the most influence, enough so that talking about it seems almost redundant now, like any treatise on So or The Joshua Tree or Thriller must've seemed when everyone in the nation was wearing their grooves into nubs. Short of perhaps the Postal Service's Give Up (anyone who's been in a semi-trendy restaurant or sports bar the last ten years will hear me) no indie-rock record is more ubiquitous than this one. I heard "A-Punk" approximately forty-seven times before I had any clue what it was. It never did charm me, but it made its way into my brain. Its pogoing rhythm and sparkly-jangly-abrasive riffing are like Wire, if they were both friendlier and more arrogant, if that makes sense -- and if their songs were about thrice as long. Plus it has flutes and generally feels like the fratty punk (not the good kind) stuff they rushed quickly afterward to shed.

That's not a ringing endorsement, obviously -- I'd love to tell you that I have warmer feelings toward "Oxford Comma" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" and "Mansard Roof" but no, not by much. This is one record on which I vastly prefer the less famous cuts. I don't know what was a "single" officially here and what wasn't, but I know that the first four cuts are to this day those most readily identified with Vampire Weekend, and probably the reason I didn't choose to spend much time thinking about them or forming much of an opinion on them when they were being referenced in Sally Forth in 2008, a time when I was more receptive to new music than I had been in years. The once-ubiquitous "Oxford Comma" does work a little better for me now, its propulsion and Koenig's delivery both inspired, though its self-conscious lyrical ironies are tired English major stuff, and that includes the repeated use of the phrase "who gives a fuck."

All four of these opening songs have aged, though, in a way that Contra hasn't. The cartoon soundtrack that is "Mansard Roof" is vital to give context to everything that flowered thereafter, but indeed "Cape Cod" does play into some of the more vicious stereotypes that would greet the band, and I don't mean class-related ones. I mean that it's the laziest kind of chillout island-rock shit. 2008 wasn't very long ago but already these seem like missives from a time of naivete, which underline how they seem like the sort of music that sounds great to you in college (cannot verify) or in the car (can). All of Vampire Weekend's music is readymade for summer, but the forceful stamp their entrance puts on this feature limits the grace of these recordings.

The album improves significantly after that, but only one song hints in any serious way at what's to come, by which I mean that word again: "grace." The dancing enormity of "Walcott" attains fleetingly the lived-in but majestic lilt that would become more apparent over the next five years. The song's remarkable sense of space, even laid against the band's clipped and quickened grooves here and everywhere, is a "whoa, wait a second" moment when something conceptually and contextually surprising starts to happen. To pick back up on the Beatles analogy from a few days ago, suppose it's the intensity of John's vocal on "There's a Place," for instance. Vampire Weekend mean to give pleasure and make a quick impression and distract you a lot on their debut, but this is your official hint that something of quite a bit more intelligence and ambition than you might first suspect is going on back there.

As for the oft-cited African influences, they're not insulting cause they're barely even there, at least no more than as an addition of mild keyboard and guitar flavor to sprightly little pop tunes. The superficially exotic "One" is surf-rock fused with Tom Tom Club and is kind of annoying, though charming enough; "Campus," which is about guess what, sounds like B. Bumble and the Stingers, and "M76" -- the best song on the record -- is defiantly European and defiantly lowbrow, its mild suggestion of classical music suggestive more of the piped-in orchestrations at a Discovery Channel Store than an evening at the symphony. Beyond that, the strongest evidence I get of the outside world is the clear Funeral debt on "I Stand Corrected," which itself tempers its propulsion with minimalist goofiness and the effect is, yeah, a little silly. The band doesn't get much tighter than on the tricky sprawled-out rhythm of "Bryn," and the songs don't get more accomplished than "The Kids Don't Stand the Catch," a subtly infectious and unusually confident way to end the record.

Mostly the album is a quick and precise introduction that now feels like just a prelude to two others, but served its purpose to what now seems like a completely different audience. It's remarkable how linear this all seems already: this is purity and the last vestiges of a certain childishness, Contra is full of doubt and self-reflection, and Modern Vampires of the City is full-on adulthood, a record made by people who appreciate the size of a world that was seen through a limited prism just half a decade ago. You couldn't craft a homemade compilation without being able to detect the gap in skill and craft from the oldest songs to the newest. I don't love this album, but I love the story it accidentally tells.

[SEE ALSO:]
Modern Vampires of the City (2013)