Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 3.5 / 5 Reviewer: Garth Paulson |
As is so often the case these days, Vampire Weekend didn’t deserve any of the outrageous conversation that swirled around their 2008 self-titled debut. They didn’t deserve the hyperbolic hype that preceded the album, nor did they deserve the inevitable tidal wave of backlash that quickly followed. It turned out—which should have been obvious from the get go—they weren’t the Great Indie Rock Saviours, and they weren’t the White Devils that some made them out to be, either.
Unfortunately, that’s just the way music discourse goes now, where bands are either A) hyped up excessively and dismissed immediately, B) roundly ignored or C) Radiohead, of whom a bad word must never be uttered. As handsome, verbose Ivy Leaguers with worldly record collections, interesting names and a bottomless dictionary of ironic pop culture references, Vampire Weekend were always destined for the first group. So the plaudits and the important predictions rolled in on the back of CD-R demos, and before Vampire Weekend even saw store shelves the pendulum had swung. People apparently decided it was high time we start reprimanding privileged white kids for liberally cribbing from black musical traditions.
Anyway, now it’s 2010 and there’s this album called Contra, but everyone is still too busy arguing about Rostam Batmanglif ripping off Paul Simon ripping off African musicians, the word ‘collegiate,’ and polo sweaters to know what to think about it. What they should think about it is pretty much the same thing that they should have thought about Vampire Weekend if they stopped bitching about ‘Upper West Side Soweto’ long enough to listen to the damn thing. That is, Contra is a nice little pop record. It has its share of flaws, sure, but it’s a nice little pop record.
That said, Contra is quite a different beast from its predecessor. The band wisely branches out from their West African sandbox to enter a more varied playground, displaying a surprising amount of versatility while doing so. Album opener ‘Horchata’ is built on marimbas and synth gurgles that would be strobe light ready if they were mixed higher. ‘California English’ begins with the same treble-heavy guitar arpeggios and stuttering rhythms from their debut but grows to include stately strings and a moaning, processed choir of Ezra Koenings. ‘Run’ is built on metronomic rhythms, a Kraftworkian synth pulse and near Mariachi horns. ‘Giving up the Gun’ goes from propulsive rocker into a bridge that prominently features what sounds like an old, flat-lining Casio desperately trying to be resuscitated. ‘Diplomat’s Son’ tosses and turns relentlessly, adding and dropping elements haphazardly and drastically altering its approach on a whim.
Contra is filled with diversions, left turns and check-this-shit-outs, and it wears most of them well. The specters of Simon and Sting still hang over the band, but here they’ve gone a long way towards establishing a real voice and silencing those who criticize them for doing little more than bleaching other cultures’ vibrant colours for the masses’ conservative pallet.
So Contra is a colossal step forward from its comparatively simple, nice little pop record predecessor. But remember those flaws? Well, it’s got quite a few of them. For one, Koening’s vocal delivery can be downright cloying at times, such as during ‘Horchata’ when he puts as much affectation as possible into the lines “In December / Drinking Horchata / I look psychotic in a balaclava.” Some of the band’s excursions also don’t work so well. The decision to use auto-tune on ‘California English’ produces an absolute horror when mixed with Koening’s divisive pipes, even though the ubiquitous robot voice machine is employed sparingly. While it’s nice to see the band attempt a shape shifter with ‘Diplomat’s Son,’ the tempo shifts are handled awkwardly, especially during an ill-advised attempt at glitch pop.
Unfortunately, the relative strengths and weaknesses of Contra are likely to go largely unnoticed as Vampire Weekend the band seems to be hardly as important as Vampire Weekend the cultural lynchpin. Those who can get past the incessant braying—or who, at least, can wait until it fades away and people move onto shouting about something else—will find a nice little pop record that’s fun, catchy, easy to listen to and as undeserving of the hype and hate as the next thing that takes its place will be.
