Vampire Weekend – ‘Vampire Weekend’
Vampire Weekend was a band without a scene. A decade after garage rock had made its return to New York City, four nerds from Columbia University were officially too late to the party. Even if they had been at the Mercury Lounge a few years earlier, Vampire Weekend would have been hilariously out of step with the kind of music that was coming from most bands at the time. All they had was a college campus.
That turned out to be their biggest asset. Spread out across 11 tracks filled to the brim with angular guitar lines, worldly percussion, bubbly bass lines, and quaint keyboard melodies; Vampire Weekend channels the excitement of a college freshman into one of the most intoxicating indie rock debuts of the entire decade.
The blend of sounds and styles that eventually became Vampire Weekend’s signature sound was still boundary-pushing in the late 2000s. Endless fingers pointed to Paul Simon and his trailblazing work with African rhythms and foreign musicians as an obvious reference point. But Ezra Koenig and Paul Simon were simply pulling from the same well a couple of decades apart – a wide-open world of musicians and songs that the band’s target audience (mostly erudite/pretentious white kids) had no knowledge of.
What set Vampire Weekend apart was their ability to form those sounds into a distinct musical identity. No one else in indie rock was using the rubbery tones and wonderfully wonky rhythms that Vampire Weekend took to heart. The mix of genres somehow coalesced into an art-pop/indie-punk/world music stew that couldn’t be replicated by anybody other than the four members of the band.
Koenig favoured the highest possible notes of his guitar. Chris Tomson had the syncopation of a samba percussionist and the ferocity of a punk drummer. Chris Baio’s bass lines were driving and melodic like the best of rock’s low-end players. Rostam Batmanglij wandered into everything from electronic buzz to classical chamber music. Together, they embraced naïvety and fun, tuning out the outside noise and pompousness of the Ivy League crowd they originally formed around.
You can think about Vampire Weekend as hard as you like. Koenig sprinkles in plenty of offbeat references, ranging from Darjeeling tea to debates over proper punctuation, to keep you busy. But what the album really excels at is rapid-fire earworms. Just look at the first four songs that come one after the other: ‘Mansard Roof’, ‘Oxford Comma’, ‘A-Punk’, and ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’. Any other act would kill to have those four songs anywhere in their repertoire. Vampire Weekend unleashed them as their first four songs.
Each track contains its own hyper-specific universe, containing characters and caricatures that have aged remarkably well. Unobtainable college flames, pueblo huts of New Mexico, and close friends who have brand new faces. Along the way, maybe you too can learn what a mansard roof (a French style of architecture) or what Benetton (a fashion brand) is. Either way, you’ll find yourself back in Cape Cod in due time.
The creative partnership of Koenig and Batmanglij continued to grow until they became co-leaders. The progression that the band made from Vampire Weekend up to Modern Vampires of the City represented a strange sort of growing up. Afterwards, Koenig had to take Vampire Weekend in a looser and more fun direction while Batmanglij needed to forge his own path. Vampire Weekend was a time before sophistication or self-consciousness, where frenetic tempos could rub elbows with hand drums and sophisticated boat parties.
Anyone too concerned with the upper-crust pretentiousness of Vampire Weekend has a clear barrier of entry: they don’t know how to loosen up and have fun. Koenig might have seemed like he approached his lyrics from a first-person perspective, but he was more clever and cutting than he gets credit for. The album makes a whole lot of sense when you realise the lyrics are coming from an observational and highly sarcastic Jewish man rather than a yacht-hopping WASP.
Vampire Weekend would quickly begin to evolve past the basic structure of their debut as the band gained prominence and confidence. But that means there’s still a great nothing-to-lose energy about Vampire Weekend that makes it eminent listenable more than a decade after its release. Vampire Weekend is so unique that it sounds more out of time than the rest of the late 2000s rock albums. It’s well on its way to becoming timeless, and Vampire Weekend will surely be playing its songs throughout the rest of their career.
