I remember it was last May sometime, and I was gorging myself on free mp3s from various indie music blogs, as I often do, when I stumbled across two songs on the Stereogum home page called "Oxford Comma" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" from an obscure band of ex-Columbia students called Vampire Weekend. Before I heard one note of the music, the first thing I noticed about this band was simply that their name is fucking terrible, and how could any decent, self-respecting band give themselves a name that bad. I mean, even if they were a second-rate local goth band, as the name clearly suggests, it would still be an awful name. But then I thought about it some more, and I figured a band with a name this awful had to have something else going for them to gain any kind of cred on a music elitist mainstay like Stereogum. So I gave it a listen. There was no doubt that this band was a bit unseasoned (the mp3s I downloaded had "Blue CD-R" listed as the album title), but I had to give it up to them. This was some seriously catchy shit.
Of course, classifying this band gets a little hairy. The band plays what essentially amounts to a hipstered-out version of the world-beat adult-contemporary that Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel made baby-boomers swoon over in the mid-80s. The singer, and principal song-writer for the band, Ezra Koenig, even inflects a faux-Afro-English patois in the same way Sting used to do on early Police records (but in a notably less obnoxious way). Though the bands use of afro-pop sounds and rhythms indicate an earnest appreciation and broad understanding of the genre, this is still the white man's blues. They're still primarily singing songs about the lives of prepped-out, over-privileged college students in the Northeast, and their lyrics are loaded with the kinds of references that speak to an obscene overabundance of multi-cultural exposure (though I do totally enjoy the Khyber Pass/Man Who Who Would Be King reference in "M79" - my favorite of their songs by far).
In a lot of ways they're exactly the kind of band critics love to buzz and blog about. Like Interpol and the Strokes before them, they've got a style that seems fresh and unique, but also catchy and familiar, and, more importantly, also very easy to break down into its component musical influences. On the other hand, they're a band that's distinctly uncool. There's no disaffected posturing, no vintage Italian leather boots, no hundred-dollar-haircuts. Even in their cover-photo for Spin they don't look like much more than four nerdy college kids that spent a little too much time digging through their parents closets and record collections. On some level, their style of music makes sense, blending the makeshift, DIY ethos of Third World pop music with the makeshift, DIY eithos of American indie rock. Vampire Weekend gives us the spirit of Paul Simon's Graceland without all the fancy, over-priced productions or cadre of multi-national studio musicians - which is to say, brought down to the level of the blogging and blog-reading public.
They've certainly come a long way way since I saw them last summer at a sparsely-populated free gig at East River Park, coming off a tour of house parties and holes-in-the-wall across the East Coast. While most of the songs on their just-released album were available as free mp3s or on an iTunes-released EP, they've definitely cleaned up their sound a bit, and probably gotten a little extra money money with which to hire a real studio engineer and insert the thumping bass and soaring string sections that were notably missing from their previous efforts. Aside from the obvious attention from bloggers, they made the cover of Spin this month, and their album is slated to debut at #17 on the Billboard chart next week. Hell, I even saw a little blurb on them the other day in OK! magazine (along with Goldfrapp and Hot Chip??). Which, if nothing else, just further serves to point out the slowness and inefficiency of the record industry and mainstream print media. So if record companies want to know why they're doomed to die a slow, painful death, buried in a mountain of unsold Herbie Hancock albums, it's because bands of scrappy college kids with awful names and mediocre lyrics are now doing a better job promoting themselves and giving the music-buying public what they want than any record company could possibly hope, and I couldn't be happier.
