Vampire WeekendVampire Weekend
XL
It’s not a story unfamiliar to the Internet age— a band of well-to-do, New York retro-hipsters generating boatloads of buzz before their debut album physically exists. A while back, The Strokes helped launch one of indie-rock’s first great, pre-release download frenzies with their album Is This It?, and that was accomplished with the comparatively archaic internet of 2001. Now, with the addition of Myspace, YouTube, faster web connections, and the rampant blogification of the music press, a band like Vampire Weekend is able to spend an entire year earning kudos for a record that no one actually owns.
With that technicality finally remedied (XL releases the band’s self-titled debut on January 29), Vampire Weekend will soon find out if they’re the internet’s latest crossover success (a la Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, etc), or an unfortunate victim of a hype machine they couldn’t control.
Whatever the sales figures eventually say, the critics’ opinions have long since come in. Vampire Weekend, a quartet of clever lads from Columbia University, are the next great band in New York’s laundry list of Velvet Underground/Television disciples. Acting accordingly, VW peppers in plenty of Strokes-style guitar riffs and too-cool-for-school singing, but they also manage to infuse some exciting new ingredients into the tired CBGB stew. “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” makes an unexpected leap to the Afro-pop rhythms of Paul Simon’s Graceland, while “Walcott” adds baroque orchestration to a Walkmen-esque piano melody. Better still, “Oxford Comma” somehow combines a simple Caribbean organ part with college snootiness and Lil’ John lyrical references. It’s a strange, extremely likable mix that’s likely to be remembered as one of the finest 2007 albums of 2008.
(Andrew Clayman)
Published in The Knoxville Voice, January 2008
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