Whenever I get into a band that I first became aware of due to a performance on Saturday Night Live, I usually assume that this makes me a bit of a Johnny-come-lately who might be jumping on a trend long after the indie music community has came, seen, raved, and gone off in search of the next big thing. And while that's often the case, it seems that I only fell behind the indie rock hipsters by a couple months at best when I decided to check out Vampire Weekend. (Damn you, Microsoft. Stop capitalizing "indie" for me. It's an adjective, not an island.) Because it was only about a month ago that I got curious and hit up the band's MySpace to stream a few songs, and read about the band's really, really brief history, and realized that I'd probably have had to attend some Ivy League college on the Eastern seaboard to get into them much sooner than I did. Not that I really care about whether I'm the first kid on my block to discover a new band... but dang, word of mouth travels fast on the Internet. These guys got a lot of buzz going out of pretty much nowhere.

So, upon hearing the name "Vampire Weekend", what would you expect a band to sound like? If you guessed "hedonistic, over-the-top heavy metal", then obviously you were thinking what I was thinking. And you are very, very wrong, my friend. Honestly, you'd probably never guess at their sound based on the name. They play a brand of stripped-down indie rock influenced by, of all things, West African pop music. That being a genre I know zip about coming from a culture (or likely a conglomeration of cultures) I know nothing about, I struggled to identify their influences when I first heard them, and came up with the Caribbean region and ska music. Apparently there's been enough influence back and forth across the Atlantic (ska has its origins in reggae, which in turn originates from African music, and apparently some of the more modern African music has been influenced by reggae, etc.), and what this all means in the end is that the style's being filtered through an unlikely group of four preppy guys from New England. Now you can say what you want about people who shouldn't be hijacking the music from someone else's culture for their own purposes - because honestly, if you feel that way, then white dudes shouldn’t be playing any form of rock & roll to begin with. I figure they're just incorporating a style and sound that they personally enjoy into a more compact format - and they put a unique stamp on it by throwing a classical string section in from time to time. I enjoy it due to the unlikely blend of sounds that comes across as fresh, quirky, and intriguing, rather than just making another attempt at turning influences from across the globe into genteel, radio-friendly pop music. (Though it is still pretty radio-friendly. At least, if you're broadcasting across the quad of your local college campus, and are in no way affiliated with Clear Channel.)

As far as lyrics go, my reaction to Vampire Weekend is a bit more mixed. Their style is a bit of a goofy mix of literate name-dropping and sophomoric, lovelorn pining for the cute co-ed down the hall. Not that I'm against a little nostalgia for my collegiate days and the numerous unrequited crushes that I put myself through or whatever, but I do appreciate when the band can transcend the simplicity and give us a lyric that appears to have more political overtones or that is just outright baffling. And despite the moments where they seem to have gone, "Hey, here's the name of a place, person, or thing we just learned about in our cultural studies course, let's use it in a song!", I think there's a pretty lean and mean approach to their songwriting and musicianship - lots of unexpected elements, but very few seem to have been tacked on just because. The songs - and the album as a whole - fly by pretty quickly, because the band has a tendency to get in, hit you with a swaying tropical rhythm or a bouncy, caffeinated guitar lick, excitedly toss out a few verses and choruses, and get out. This results in several songs flying close to the 2 minute mark, with only 2 of the eleven exceeding four minutes - none of these songs will even come close to wearing out their welcome, unless you don't like the style to begin with, or Ezra Koenig's schoolboy yelp starts to get on your nerves. I think it's charming, but it does mean that their self-titled album, little over half an hour long, is a bit of a light snack. Just a few more songs of the same general quality, with perhaps a little more care to watch their language (the occasional f-word feels a little bit out of place given their vocabulary), and they could've hit a home run with this one.

Still, it's another one of those addictive little discs that I can't help but pop in time and time again. So they've done a hell of a lot more right than wrong here.

Mansard Roof
The Argentines collapse in defeat
The admiralty surveys the remnants of the fleet
The ground beneath their feet is a nautically mapped sheet
As thin as paper while it slips away from you...
A few toots from an organ give this song a playful, laid-back tone right at the beginning, but before you know it you're swept away in the flurry of some serious, booty-shaking drums, sounding very much like the indie rock version of an African tribal dance colliding with a Western military drum march. This is all going on while Ezra Koenig - doing his damndest to sound more soulful than the preppie Ivy League white kid he actually is (and that ain't a bad thing thing; it's just an unusual juxtaposition of personalities) - is singing about New England architecture and Argentine fleets and whatnot. It's kinetic, it's addictive, and it's almost got the flavor of Sufjan Stevens flung across the Atlantic (you know, the whole college marching band thing, heavy on the cymbals and all). And did I mention that there's a violin, too? Oh, the sweetness of it all! The only thing I can really take away points here is that the whole thing comes careening to a sudden halt just past the two-minute mark.

Oxford Comma
Why would you lie about how much coal you have?
Why would you lie about something dumb like that?
Enter the most amusing song perhaps ever written on the subject of proper punctuation. (That might not be true. I'm not totally up on They Might Be Giants‘s lexicon.) This one's got more of a laid-back beat, with the tendency to let the tempo creep up during the chorus, but for the most part it's rather chill, and more than a bit tongue-in-cheek (just in case the opening line of "Who gives a f*ck about an Oxford Comma?" didn't clue you in). I take this tune as a proverbial thumb of the nose to elitists who judge your worth by such trivial things as whether you remember to put the proper comma before the "and" when you're at the end of a list of three or more things (for example: Lions, tigers, - note comma here - and bears). To some, pointing out that you know these rules and adhere to them is a sort of class system, a way to make yourself look like you're smarter and you have more commas in your yearly salary than the next guy. (Meaning seven figures. You do the math.) VW cuts through the B.S. in sort of a roundabout way that I don't fully understand, using "coal" as a metaphor for money, talking about trips to meet the Dalai Lama and quoting rapper Lil' Jon and all that. Quite a bit to unravel, but it's a feisty little song that probably torpedoed its chances of being a hit due to that pesky little effword.

A-Punk
His Honor drove southward, seeking exotica
Down to the pueblo huts of New Mexico
Cut his teeth on turquoise harmonicas...
This song was my first exposure to the band (it’s their first single, I think), and it was the one that led me to mistakenly assume they were some sort of ska band without horns. You can hear it in Chris Tomson's lively drums and the uncomplicated, ever-so-slightly-skanky lead guitar that fuels the song. Just about where you'd expect the horns to pop up during Ezra's mouthful of a geographical/political rant, instead we get a Mellotron, of all things, which turns out to be one of the oddly charming hooks of the song (the other being some lively shouts of "Ay! Ay! Ay! Ay!" at the end of the chorus). The chorus itself is an unlikely hook - just the same line repeated four times in somewhat anti-climactic fashion: "Look outside at the raincoats coming, say 'oh'." It's that simple "oh" that throws me off - you'd expect a little vocal magic on that simple, throwaway word, instead of it just being blurted out and falling to the ground with a dull thud. Ironically, the dead space where you'd expect more words to be is what gets it stuck in my head. This is all said and done within the space of about 2:15 - this band may have a lot of unexpected words, but they sure don't waste time with any unnecessary ones.

Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
As a young girl, Louis Vuitton
With your mother, on the sandy lawn
As a sophomore, with reggaeton
And the linens you're sittin' on...
Here's a song whose title accurately sums up the band's sound as a whole - a swaying, African-inspired musical style ("kwassa kwassa" being a dance rhythm involving the hands following the movement of the hips - thanks, Wikipedia!) being transplanted to the unlikely locale of maritime Massachusetts. It's like sitting on the beach and enjoying a warm cup of clam chowder or something. Anyway, they've got a cute little call-and-response going here, between the unfussy lyrics (which basically involve a guy persuading a girl to get it on with him - not one of their deeper outings) and the repeating guitar hook, both of which take great care to not overlap each other. Tomson does a great job on the hand drums here, while Koenig offers his best falsetto vocal breakdown by stretching the word "do" at the end of "Like you know I do" into several sweet "oohs" at the end of the chorus. Total singalong moment, right there! And let's not overlook the playful keyboard fills provided by Rostam Batmanglij, who might just be the unsung hero of the band.

M79
No excuse to be so callous
Dress yourself in bleeding Madras
Charm your way across the Khyber pass...
The band's classical influence very nearly dominates this song, thanks to the dual attack of lively string section and glittery keyboards that get it off and running. You can still hear the tropical influence in the start-stop guitar playing and the distant shouts of "Whoa!" in the background, which give the song a lot of flavor. But try to make sense of the lyrics that are pushed up to the foreground, and you've got quite a tangle on your hands. This one's supposedly named after a bus that the guys have ridden around Boston, but there's a lot more geographic name-dropping going on here, again leading me to believe that there's some sort of socio-political statement being made, but one that I can't make much sense of, beyond the very clear line, "Racist dreams you should not have." A charged statement like that makes me interested in unlocking the rest of the song, but with references to a place called the Khyber Pass and an individual (?) named Jackson Crowther, I don't even know where to begin. Total blast of a song, though.

Campus
In the afternoon, you're out on the stone and grass
And I'm sleeping on the balcony after class...
Here's one that's a lot more easily digested, though almost to the point of seeming a little slight. It won't take long to figure out that this one's the lament of a college kid who has to endure the untold pain of having to see his former flame (or crush) walking across the campus everyday, knowing that he can never have her back (or possibly even for the first time). Depending on how literally you interpret the song, she might be one of his professors, which kind of adds a fun wrinkle. But the cultural name-dropping seems out of place here in an otherwise uncomplicated song - throwing the line "Spilled kefir on your keffiyeh" in there just makes it seem like they're trying too hard. I get the "ska" feeling from this song, too - it's got that semi-pathetic and sort of nerdy feel to it that makes it seem like it could have been a Five Iron Frenzy song in another life - but again, it isn't ska at all, because there are no horns and the main thrust is provided by the guitars and Chris Baio's bass in this case.

Bryn
Ion displacement won't work the basement
Especially when I'm not with you
Here in the heartland, a feeling so startling
I don't know what I should do...
Of all of the kick-butt drum grooves on the album, this one might be my favorite of them all - it's in 6/8 time, but played in a way that it keeps changing up the count - "ONE two three ONE two three ONE two ONE two ONE two." It's guaranteed to get me banging on the old steering wheel when I really ought to be paying attention in traffic! A melodic guitar line meanders throughout, and we get another silly little story about unrequited love - this time, I almost wonder if the guy's falling for his biology lab partner or something. He tells her that she can "see through the dark, right through the fireflies that sleep in my heart", which is cheesy any way you slice it, but at least it's a creative expression of cheese. I'm quite stricken by the whole thing, and only slightly bummed that it, too, wraps itself up in decidedly uncomplicated fashion just past the two minute mark. What's with most of this band's best songs being so dang short? I was enjoying that hook, give me a little more space to get better acquainted with it!

One (Blake's Got a New Face)
Occident out on the weekend
That's the way that we relax
English breakfast tastes like Darjeeling
But she's too cute to even ask...
Here's one that you're either gonna love or hate, almost entirely depending on whether you think it's cute or insufferable when a male vocalist's voice cracks upon trying to hit a note he can't quite reach. That's the case for this song's chorus, in which Ezra spits out, "BLAKE'S! Got a new face!" with that first word really jumping out of the speakers with an almost embarrassing amount of boyish enthusiasm. (Then the rest of the guys chime in rather suavely, as if to save him from his little vocal blunder.) I kind of think it's fun, now that I'm used to it. This is in no small part due to the bouncy rhythm, jangly guitars, little bits of electronic keyboards, and bumping bass that run throughout the song, making it a curiously whimsical ode to... uh... a cute coed who got plastic surgery? Yeah, no clue on this one, either. But who needs to worry about meanings of song lyrics when you have such oddly amusing things going on in the music such as the little "whisper solo" that constitutes the bridge?

I Stand Corrected
You've been checking on my facts
And I admit I have been lax
In double-screening what I say
It wasn't funny anyway...
I have to admit, I'm not as big of a fan of this one. It's got a good, tom-tom-heavy rhythm once the beat gets going, and appears to be an apology song from the point of view of a guy who wasn't smart enough to filter his own words and ended up saying something really, really dumb. But the quiet intro, with just the hum of the Mellotron backing up Ezra's vocals, squanders what could have been a slick transition from one fun song into another. And the chorus is just the three words of the song's title, sung rather plainly. So, I don't know - they probably could have done more with this one.

Walcott
The lobster's claw is sharp as knives
Evil feasts on human lives
The Holy Roman Empire roots for you...
Here's a splendid little piece of music - definitely the climactic point on the album, performance-wise - where the entire band really brings their A-game, turning out a boisterous, frenetic rocker (comparative to VW's usual style, anyway) that's bound to put a smile on your face with its rapid-fire, cascading piano riff synched up with Ezra's jittery guitar playing (it's that thing where you play a bunch of sixteenth notes really fast on a single string, whatever that's called). The lyrics are an invitation from one college student looking for an adventure to another, saying that we should ditch this gloomy old place called Cape Cod and head off down the coast looking for a few thrills. Unfortunately, I become strongly hesitant about the song once it gets to the point where Ezra proclaims, "The bottleneck is a sh*t show, Hyannesport is a ghetto", and then later, rather rudely tells the guy, "F*ck the women from Wellfleet, f*ck the bears out in Provincetown" - you figure that can't be a good way to get a local audience to win you over. I suppose it's just a slice of life, where the guy's been wronged by some of the losers in his own backyard and he just needs to get out and get some fresh perspective on life, but that "f*ck the women" line comes across as a bit sexist, using either interpretation of the effword. Aside from my personal reservations, I can bet that this one would be the perfect blast of energy to close out the evening at a lively Vampire Weekend show.

The Kids Don't Stand a Chance
You criticize the practice
By murdering their plants
Ignoring all the history
Denying them romance...
The album closes with its only true ballad, a faux-reggae sort of number in which Ezra laments, in his most cryptic fashion, a society which is so caught up with (capitalism? Jingoism? Colonialism? You tell me) that they're screwing over their own young. The laid-back drum beat and the colorful keyboards make it easy to overlook what feels like it might be a protest song, and it becomes even more devious when the band beings back the stately string section for an encore performance, in which they totally take the song to a new level. I have no idea how this one'll translate live, but it's a good comedown at the end of a sometimes frenetic album that you might miss the bulk of if you sneeze a few times.

As far as I'm concerned, Vampire Weekend can do more of the same on their next album and still be a hit with me, as long as they actually make a point to do more of it. I feel like they've concocted a fascinating mixture of styles in a way that they've only begun to really explore, so there's a lot of potential for their future output. What they've got against them is the fact that they became a buzz band before they'd truly been time-tested, which means that they could show marked improvement next time around and still run the risk of being overlooked. But I'll try to remain sunny and optimistic, because hey, it's hard not to be when you're listening to vampires having a little fun in the sun.

ALBUM WORTH:
Mansard Roof $1
Oxford Comma $1
A-Punk $1.50
Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa $1
M79 $1.50
Campus $1
Bryn $1.50
One (Blake's Got a New Face) $1.50
I Stand Corrected $.50
Walcott $1
The Kids Don't Stand a Chance $1.50
TOTAL: $13

Band Members:
Ezra Koenig: Lead vocals, guitar
Rostam Batmanglij: Keyboards, backing vocals
Chris Tomson: Drums, backing vocals
Chris Baio: Bass, backing vocals

Websites:
http://www.vampireweekend.com
http://www.myspace.com/vampireweekend

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Hanging With Friends