Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend
XL
2008
Rating:


Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut is the sound of a band coming into its own, but that isn't quite fully formed. This quartet of former Columbia University students calls its style of music "Upper West Side Soweto," at once referencing Manhattan's posh liberal neighborhood and the poor South Western Townships of Johannesburg, South Africa.

The inelegance of the self-styled genre label speaks to the frequent awkwardness of Vampire Weekend's music. The band's application of Ivy League snark ("Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?") to appropriated African and Caribbean rhythms frequently results in a heartless sound that's closer to lesser ska or Guster than the more skilled musical amalgamation and lyrical cleverness of Talking Heads and The Clash.

Case in point "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," set to the Congolese rhythms from which the song takes its name, is about a girl listening to regaetton while sitting on Benetton sheets. "It feels so unnatural," Ezra Koening sings. His auto-critique of the song's discomfiture doesn't make him his assessment any less right.

Songs like "A-Punk," "Bryn" and "Walcott" suggest Vampire Weekend does possess the ability to properly its dueling obsessions of the privilege of Columbia and Cape Cod and the proletariat funk of Afro-pop. The appropriately named "A-Punk" is the sharp multicultural experimentalism of The Clash or The Specials. "Bryn" unfolds in driving six-eight time with Koening playing triplets on his guitar so the instrument almost sounds like an Irish fiddle. The song is also poetically romantic, with lines like "Oh Bryn! / You see in the dark / Right past the fireflies that sleep in my heart." "Walcott" returns the band to Cape Cod, but this time the affluent Massachusetts beach is a place to escape from. Rostam Batmanglij's pounding piano and strings also find the band at its most sprawling.

The album lyrically ends with Koening singing, "The kids don't stand a chance." That isn't quite true of Vampire Weekend. The debut is underwhelming as the announcement of a major new talent, but in the album's finest moments there's reason to believe these kids stand a chance of making their unique sound work.

Posted Saturday, February 2, 2008

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