Music Box | Vampire Weekend

Mike Newmark Columnist

You could call Vampire Weekend the Minutemen of the 21st century. Though singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig is more likely to greet you with a cheery wave than the late D. Boon, both bands’ defining characteristic is their propensity to overlay leftfield genres onto a solid foundation of user-friendly punk.

By now it’s no secret that Vampire Weekend’s modus operandi is to hybridize African pop music and college rock, thanks to pre-release blogger buzz that rivaled that of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, as well as the band’s own accounts to the press in a recent interview with National Public Radio. In that interview, Koenig described a love affair with an obscure Madagascan compilation CD from the 1980s that set the whole project in motion.

Say what you will about a bunch of white Columbia University graduates tapping into a relatively destitute region for inspiration, but you can’t be an aspiring artist in New York City without spending some time exploring the world. The Afro-pop influence is what lends the guitars and synthesizers their sunny, sprightly tone, splashing color onto an otherwise monochromatic canvas.
To most ears, however, Vampire Weekend will sound like nothing more than well-written indie pop with bits of punk, caffeinated electro-pop and surf rock thrown in. You never get the sense from Vampire Weekend that the band members are overwhelmed by their own concept, and all of the world music gobbledygook that bloggers have used to describe it obscures the fact that it’s a fabulous party record: up-tempo, uncomplicated and disarmingly catchy.

Perhaps the reason why Vampire Weekend doesn’t sound prototypically “African” is because of the drumming. Chris Tomson’s jaunty rhythms keep everything firmly grounded in the Western rock tradition, while the rest of the musicians try more cross-cultural things, providing a handful of songs with their brightest moments. On their first single, “Mansard Roof,” Tomson stamps out a beat that’s halfway between a march and a shuffle and sped up to 160 bpm, while 8-bit electronics and synthesized strings run to catch up, during which Koenig sings what sounds like an optimistic version of Green Day’s “Basket Case.” You don’t just bounce to “Mansard Roof”—it bounces you, and two minutes after it’s over you’re hitting the repeat button like a rat trying to score another food pellet.

“A-Punk” gets even quicker with a rhythm section straight out of Rocket to Russia and surf-rock guitars that recall Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello dancing on the set of Beach Party. There’s a strong vintage streak running through this record, from the Buddy Hollyesque pianos on “Walcott” to the cheeky ’70s post-punk of “One (Blake’s Got a New Face),” though the band pulls off the neat and not unimpressive hat trick of sounding only like itself. “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” (also the name of the musical style they’re said to have created) comes closest to the traditional Afro-pop they were reaching for, with Tomson playing the djembe and Koenig singing in high vocal trills, but it’s followed by “Campus,” a silly little love song anchored by a bass chord progression that mirrors the one in the Minutemen’s “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth,” and we’re back in familiar Vampire Weekend territory: low-maintenance and extremely habitable.

The only song that doesn’t ring true is the closer, “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance,” a waterlogged British reggae number whose myriad missteps highlight what Vampire Weekend does right nearly everywhere else. Pulling from disparate musical sources and throwing them into the salad bowl is part and parcel of Vampire Weekend’s methodology, but this one sounds too derivative, capturing The Police at one of their more lugubrious moments.

Koenig’s reggae vocals are uncertain where they once seemed pliant and confident, and instruments don’t mesh but exist loosely atop each other, unaware of the others’ existence. The track’s melody, title and cautionary metaphors are all downers; it’s like ending a party with a warning about getting mugged on the way home.

By contrast, some of the band’s best songs are about absolutely nothing. The entire subject of “One (Blake’s Got a New Face)” is that Blake, whoever he may be, has a new face. And the opening line of “Oxford Comma” isn’t at all what you’d expect from a group of good Columbia boys who assumedly aced all of their classes: “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”

In fact, there’s something quite telling about that line, in that it may shed light on who Vampire Weekend is and their approach to making music. Not that they ever intended to hide anything. Of course Koenig and company know what an Oxford comma is, just like they know what a mansard roof is and what kwassa kwassa is—pieces of information you have to study in school or seek out on your own.

Yet there’s nothing particularly sedulous about Vampire Weekend, nothing so self-consciously academic as to appear like a footnote in a music history exegesis. Even the most potentially encyclopedic moment on the record—“Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”—sounds as though it was played on a college lawn to sun-impregnated students without a care in the world.

On their debut, the young men of Vampire Weekend come off like well-traveled but still curious explorers, excited about the possibilities of where their chosen path might lead and capable of using the resources under their belts to get there. Scoff, if you want, at their Ivy League pedigree; Vampire Weekend is one of the best examples I can think of to demonstrate education’s true (and often obscured) purpose of personal enrichment, and lucky us, we get to reap the benefits.