By Elliot Boswell
So yes, then, a quick rundown of a couple of the reasons Vampire Weekend (hereafter referred to as VW, or, maybe "The Bugs," in the most affectionate way possible) has thrown the music world into a state of confusion:
1) They're Columbia-educated preps. One of the many beautiful things about pop music has always been that you can be a great artist without any formal education; in fact, very few of the Inarguably Great ever went to college.
2) It's not hard to conceive of VW springing neatly into existence without ever having listened to Pavement (God forbid...), which is throwing the current indie world for quite a loop.
Coupled with both of these is the fact that this New York quartet has a huge affinity for African music and writes songs with titles like "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," and pretty soon, terms like "post-colonial appropriation" are being thrown around, and well, you can probably imagine the brouhaha.
But despite all of the above - which is by no means an exhaustive list - Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut came down to the songs: 11 sonic salvos of rarely more than three minutes each, most of them Afro-poppy gems about faux pas with the fairer sex, campus days, East Coast life, etc.
It's most often been compared to Paul Simon's 1986 chef-d'oeuvre "Graceland" (of which this particular reviewer is such a merciless fan that his own dad threatened homicide if he "ever hears so much as one song ever again"), and established the group as, well, maybe not a household name, but certainly a dorm-room one.
So it's a little too tempting to compare VW's new record "Contra" (XL Recordings) to "Rhythm of the Saints," Simon's follow-up to "Graceland." But in some respects, the parallels ring true. (And the band seems to hint at it too - late in the course of the record, Ezra Koenig sings, "Cause I'm gonna take it from Simon.") Track for track, though, "Contra" isn't quite the knockout of its predecessor, yet as an album, it hangs together pretty well, sparkled here and there with ear-worms that rank among the best stuff the band has released to date.
The opening track, "Horchata," begins with as good a couplet as any in recent memory where Ezra Koenig sings, "In December, drinkin' horchata/ I'd look psychotic in a balaclava." Cue a beepity-boop hook on top of a gentle marimba line, and it actually ends up being a pretty fair foreshadowing of what the rest of "Contra" holds in store: An artful synthesis of VW's clean, pre-existing sound with restrained beats and sampling, the string section all but excised, and underpinned throughout by Koenig's (mostly) manic singing style.
It probably comes as no surprise to fans of the group's first album that part of their Aesthetic 2.0 includes forays into reggae, most clearly on songs like "Holiday" and "Run," the latter of whose pull-start guitar intro has the effect of revving side two of the record to life. "California English" revisits some of Koenig's favorite lyrical themes - satirizing rich girls and political correctness both - over a frenetic electro-beat that could have been lifted from MGMT if it would relax a bit.
Some moments are less compelling than others, of course: "Holiday" doesn't really go anywhere and the contemplative "Taxi Cab" doesn't work all that well, as it's buttressed on either side by two of the higher-tempo tracks on "Contra."
Those two more than made up for, however, with the right/left jab combo of the truly Simon-esque "White Sky," (whose twinkling intro brings to mind "Graceland's" "Crazy Love, Vol. II"), and the lead single "Cousins," a track with the rhythm-heavy verse and seizure-worthy guitar breaks that sold so many of us on their debut. With this latter effort, as the guitars morph from madcap strumming to kind of pealing like church bells (that looks way weirder in print than it actually sounds on record), we find ourselves landing on a relatively softer resolution than anything VW offered us two years ago, and it's surprisingly welcome.
As if to prove that the gentle ending of "Cousins" was no accident, "Contra" closes with a triad of arguably the mellowest songs in the Vampire Weekend canon: "Giving Up the Gun," "Diplomat's Son" and "I Think Ur a Contra."
All of them channel Joe Strummer (of The Clash fame, for those of you without a taste for punk rock ... and who live under a rock) to one degree or another - Strummer's father was indeed a diplomat - and have been subtly imbued with his political inclinations as well, as lines like, "My ears are blown to bits/ From all the rifle hits/ But still I crave that sound." "Diplomat's Son" even samples M.I.A., to give you an idea.
Neatly-ish put, I guess, "Contra" is the sound of a confident band sticking with what it does best while absorbing the treasures of other musical worlds. Considering the flak VW's taken over the last couple of years, this is a courageous move and, as it turns out, a fruitful one too. We should commend them for it.
