Vampire Weekend 'self-titled' album

You want ideas? Vampire Weekend have ideas. They’ve also got wit, imagination, an eye for lyrical detail and an ear for musical adventure. Most importantly Vampire Weekend have tunes. Oh yes, they’ve got tunes. One of them is a clipped but percussively jaunty number called Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa which, in Vampire Weekend’s cosmoverse, is also a musical genre.

‘That’s half a joke,’ clarifies frontman Ezra Koenig - a twenty-something who grew up in New Jersey, went to college in New York and now lives in Brooklyn. ‘The guitar part of Cape Cod is one of our most African-sounding songs,’ he concedes, ‘but I was listening to accordion music at the time we were writing it, and it could be said to sound Irish. We get ideas from all over the place. It’s involuntary and instinctive.’

What about A-Punk, which Vampire Weekend see as an exemplar of something they’ve dubbed ‘Upper West Side Soweto’?

‘It’s kinda ridiculous,’ says Koenig of the four-piece band’s geo-ethno-genre-nomenclature-hopping, ‘but we’re not being heavy-handed abut it. That song happened when our bass player Chris [Baio] and I were jamming – he was on drums – and we had a riff that sounded like a punk song, but it was also different ‘cause it was on the high strings. The African rhythms came together when we were playing as a group – we knew we didn’t want it to sound like a straight-ahead rock song.’

Straight-ahead. As if. This is indie-rock that isn’t indie-rock, a joyously exuberant carnival of melody and rhythm. Strings. Organs. Afro-funk guitars. Courtly 18th century harpsichord. A bit of post-punk (maybe Franz Ferdinand crossed with the Bhundu Boys?). Lyrics about grammar and architecture and preferred bus routes and the British Imperial origins of American preppie fashion. With fleet-footed pizzazz Vampire Weekend deploy all these to craft a tinglingly refreshing sound. Anyone for brainy party music?

Ezra Koenig (singer, guitar, studied English), Rostam Batmanglij (keyboards, studied Music), Chris Baio (bass, studied Russian Regional Studies) and Christopher Tomson (drummer, studied Music and Economics), all 23, started at New York’s Columbia University in 2002.

‘Ezra and I were both really into pop and classical music,’ recalls Batmanglij. ‘When we first met we thought we should be a band – but that it didn’t happen till four years later. We tried being a folk band, which was cool but we only played one show. We kept working on music separately and playing each other music. Then we stared working on recording a rap group.’

Eventually, in February 2006, Vampire Weekend began to take shape. They took their name from a lo-fi vampire movie that Koenig made ‘for fun’. The plot involved a character named Walcott going to Cape Cod, a WASPY-y hangout on the American eastern seaboard. The first song he would write for the band featured the same character: ‘Walcott’ is an insanely catchy, pell-mell drums’n’piano’n’cello belter over which Koenig advises his hero that “the lobster’s claw is sharp as knives/evil feasts on human lives/the Holy Roman Empire roots for you…”

Initially, even before the songs were taking coherent shape, the four talked about ‘ideas and things we were interested in,’ says Koenig. In notes he drew up prior to making the video for new second single A-Punk, Koenig wrote: ‘a lot of the initial discussions were about the connections between preppiness and colonialism - the historical links between modern American/British preppiness and fabrics/colours from India, Africa and the Caribbean.’

Can he explain that? And how does that relate to a video, which Batmanglij describes as ‘jittery Charlie Chaplin meets The Mighty Boosh’? (Vampire Weekend got into The Mighty Boosh on a transatlantic flight to the UK last summer, a trip that resulted in them signing, in the teeth of furious label interest, with XL Recordings.)

‘I’m interested in how American preppiness is explicitly linked to Victorian British Imperialism,’ says Koenig. ‘Preppiness is portrayed as this very traditional, domestic thing, from New England and Britain – but the truth is it comes out of this time period where the world’s cultures were getting mixed up for the first time. The reason that’s interesting now is that we really have this global society.’

This fed into the songs Vampire Weekend were writing: ‘it got me thinking about incorporating musical influences that some people view as “tropical”. But it’s not hard to integrate that stuff into traditional Western guitar music. It’s not hard to make it cohesive.’

Well, it’s not hard if you have the songwriting savvy of Vampire Weekend. In early 2007 they burnt some 100 copies of a CD-R featuring demo versions of ten of their songs. They handed them out at shows in New York and mailed some to labels. Batmanglij, who’s worked on soundtracks outside of the band, says now it was a ‘good template’ for their debut album, and for what they wanted to do when they got a proper – that is, decent but not extravagant – recording budget.

‘I was writing string parts that sounded like folk music – Van Morrison’s Sweet Thing was definitely an inspiration. There’s something very raw in them. And I was always fascinated by Fiona Apple’s version of Across The Universe. One spring break Ezra and I went to see [visionary Apple producer] Jon Brion do his [weekly, cult, multi-instrumental] set at Largo in Los Angeles – I went up to him and asked him what that sound was…’ It was a Chamberlin, and Vampire Weekend set about working it into their already-eclectic sound-palette. But at the same time, ‘minimalism was something Ezra and I agreed on from early on, in terms of what we liked in production – The Neptunes and Timbaland even.’

You can hear all this in M79, a standout at the heart of Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut. It’s named after a Manhattan bus, and advises that you “dress yourself in bleeding madras/charm your way across the Khyber Pass”. But hear it and you might think you have one foot in the palace of Versailles in the time of Marie Antoinette, another in an African township. ‘We’re very excited about that song’ says Koenig. ‘It’s expanded our sound and is moving us to the next level’.

There’s enough going on this level for now. Take Oxford Comma, a spartan funk charmer that references a piece of grammar (you can look it up). Or the jangle-pop hoedown of Ladies Of Cambridge, from their first single (“I’ve had dreams of Boston all my life”): hard-of-thinking commentators have clocked Vampire Weekend’s smart clobber and described the song as an ode to some of American’s most lah-di-dah – ie posh –burghs. Not a bit of it: ‘It’s more an analysis of that lifestyle than a celebration of it,’ says Koenig. Then there’s the other song on that debut, limited edition UK single, Mansard Roof. Said roof is an architectural style that offers extra living space in an attic. The lyrics then go on: “the Argentines collapse in defeat, the admiralty surveys the remnants of the fleet”.

Of the meanings and connections, Koenig would like to ‘keep it vague. It was inspired by things I was reading. There’s also, from the first line, a kind of set formula of how the next verse should go. A lot of the lyrics also come from stories I’d written around the same time Vampire Weekend started. Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa was originally a story about a girl who was reminiscing about being young and vacationing on Cape Cod.’

You want world music? That is, music of the world? You want Vampire Weekend. You can throw yourself around the moshpit to Campus. You can imagine what happened to characters in A-Punk before they ended up in the song (“Johanna drove slowly across the city/the Hudson River all filled with snow/she spied the ring on his honour’s finger/oh-oh-oh”). You can shed a tear, then shed your clothes, at the hymnal-meets-tribal thunder of I Stand Corrected. You can think about that preppie/colonial stuff and how it relates to the history of pop. Then you can get back in the moshpit with this tremendous live band for the mighty Walcott.

And/or you can just be blown away by a revelatory and landmark debut album that will cast a long, inescapable and bright shadow over 2008. If anyone can cast a ‘bright shadow’, it’s the inspired men of Vampire Weekend.

who is who?
Vampire Weekend are:
Ezra Koenig (singer, guitar, studied English)
Rostam Batmanglij (keyboards, studied Music)
Chris Baio (bass, studied Russian Regional Studies)
Christopher Tomson (drummer, studied Music and Economics)

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Vampire Weekend - self-titled