Review: Vampire Weekend – Contra

January 13th, 2010 by Oswald Hobbes / Comment on this post

A lot of people hate Vampire Weekend for not-very-good reasons. For instance, the band’s affluence (and complete lack of shame about it) rubs cred-lovers the wrong way – although I’m guessing that the haters in question aren’t too badly off themselves, given the amount of time they have to worry about what kind of shoes these dudes wear. The list of grievances along these lines is long and well-known by this point, so we don’t need to rehash them all here. But it should be noted that there’s nothing particularly offensive about the brand of genial indie rock Vampire Weekend play. They’re not exactly innovative, but they are playful and humorous. It feels like forever since I first downloaded a rough copy of their first record and fell deeply in love with it two years ago, so it’s a very big deal in my corner of the Assault offices that Contra is now available for mass consumption.

But before we get to the actual record, two questions: do the masses want it, and how will they consume it? It’s my suspicion that Vampire Weekend will forever remain a niche band. Granted, that niche is pretty big due to the current indie-friendly cultural climate, and they’re set to play the Riv here in Chicago instead of Metro for their upcoming North American tour. But is music this smart and odd fit to break out on radio waves ruled by Will.I.Am? (Note: It’s not even the oddness that’s the problem, as I see it – most urban radio jams feel beamed in from a distant galaxy these days. It’s more the obvious, unfiltered intelligence and the way intelligence seems to alienate most “normal” Americans.) As for consumption, let’s get to that next.

Do you still buy CDs? I mostly do not. From the age of eleven to twenty-four, though, I purchased more compact discs than probably 80% of average citizens. I racked up huge credit card debt doing this that still needs to be paid off (or filed into bankruptcy, more likely), and I thought quitting would be virtually impossible. Those shiny little platters were a very serious addiction to me. I didn’t romanticize them to the extent that contrarian oddballs do vinyl, but they did mean a lot to me. Then times got tough and I sold most of them. And then I started doing something I didn’t ever think I would do: downloading, For legal purposes I should probably state that we can’t officially endorse stealing music digitally, but let’s not shit ourselves, either: we all do it. We do it because it’s easy and it’s fun and you can have all the music you want for no money at all. The only CDs I purchase now are ones like this: Contra is a keeper, music that you’ll want to have a high-quality permanent physical copy of. It’s also a grower, which is why I started thinking about these other issues, and why we haven’t started discussing the music yet.

But let’s do that now: Contra is almost deliberately obnoxious for its first few spins. Lead single “Cousins” established well before the record’s release that Vampire Weekend weren’t going to tone down their attack to appease critics. It’s a hyper-caffeinated sprint built on weird time signatures and featuring instrumentation that’s best described simply as “weird noises.” My girlfriend thinks it sounds like Tapes N Tapes; I don’t think it sounds like anything other than an extremely gangsta statement of “just don’t give a fuck” purpose. The rest of the album pretty much follows suit; tracks like “California English,” with its unnaturally sped-up vocals and (I think?) flutters of Auto-Tune dare you to reject them for being too “experimental.”

But there’s no experimentation at all happening here, which is not a complaint. This is as straight-forward a heavily hyped sophomore record as the Strokes’ Room On Fire. If you’re like me and you fucking loved Room On Fire and everything it represented about that band, you’ll probably have a similar reaction to Contra. Vampire Weekend do the Vampire Weekend thing, but more so, and with slight tweaks that provide the necessary illusion of real progress. The band’s self-titled debut is among my top ten favorite album of all time, and that’s because it’s an unforced, organic expression of something unique and fun. Contra (given the time to gain traction) might not follow too closely behind when all is said and done.

Now, back to the question of consumption: I downloaded this record over the weekend for the express purpose of writing about it within the immediate release window. I hated it the first time I listened to it – actually turned it off halfway through “California English” on my first two attempts to get through it. But listen to me now; I’m clearing room for it in my personal pantheon of great shit. And I have no problem paying ten bucks for a nice copy of it at Best Buy in a few days. But if I hadn’t needed to hear it to write about it, I probably would’ve said “Screw it” and let the majority of it remain unheard. This seems lazy, even to me, but I have a lot of music to listen to on any given week. And this is the problem with having access to all the music one can listen to: you probably don’t listen to any given piece of music enough. CDs, with that upfront investment of actual capital, have a greater chance of rewarding you.

And as to the question before that: I don’t think the world is quite ready for Vampire Weekend. Hopefully this record will be more commercially successful than the last one, and, since the band has already been slapped with some serious backlash before they even got back into the recording studio, hopefully their audience will love this even more than their debut. (Certainly there’s more to love: tracks like “Taxi Cab” and “Diplomat’s Son” display the kind of growth that matters – a maturity of message and execution, non-reliant on speed or volume to make a major impact.) But how big can Vampire Weekend get? How big should they get? Is there something wrong with me for liking this so damn much, or would everyone feel this way if they heard it on heavy rotation and became accustomed to it? Will people ever get tired of music that’s ham-fisted and structurally retarded? I do not know.

But I do think about it, moreso in regards to this band than most others I listen to, and I think that’s because I’m really rooting for them to keep being so warm and sincere and flat-out amazing. I complain all the time that music critics don’t engage with bands after hyping them heavily early on; later works are too easily labeled “disappointments” in favor of the next new thing around the pike. So I’m engaging. I don’t want to describe how this band sounds to you; you already know. All I really want to say is this: Contra is music so particular, idiosyncratic, and goofy that it seems gimmicky. But it’s not. These are smart, solid, well-crafted songs that will get into your heart and set up shop for good if you let them.

So: let them.