NYC indie pop band Vampire Weekend came off the starting block like Nosferatu after drinking the blood of the entire Romanian Olympic track team. Got their collegiate mugs on the cover of Spin before their debut album hit the record stores! The buzz was enormous! Everyone loved them! Music critics! Normal people! Werewolves even! And 2008’s Vampire Weekend exceeded expectations. The world swooned!
Well I didn’t. What I hear when I listen to Vampire Weekend is the Paul Simon World Music Academy Glee Club. They culturally appropriated the same nifty Afropop Art Garfunkel’s old singing partner so deftly Simonized, tossed in just enough strings to get the label “chamber pop” slapped on ‘em, and put the whole mess to work in some undeniably catchy but lighter than lightweight pop songs that are not devoid of charm. Called their sound “Upper West Side Soweto.”
But they don’t fool me! They’re The Killers with better academic bona fides (they attended Columbia!), a more eclectic record collection, and a lead singer who reminds me of Sting after undergoing angst reduction surgery. Slight is the word I would use to describe them. And dull. They’re energy vampires whose music I can’t get away from fast enough—pure Transylvanian tedium. Their music is the antithesis of sanguine. It’s defanged. They don’t drink blood, they drink milk—the 2% stuff probably.
Of course there was pushback—there always is. Some wag dubbed them “the whitest band in the world,” to which the band responded by noting there wasn’t a single WASP in the band. Which is fair enough. But I don’t see any Fela Kuti lookalikes in their press glossies either. I think what said snide commentator was getting at is they’ve bleached all of the black out of their Afrobeat, just as The Police did with reggae, only Vampire Weekend used more bleach.
No one’s going to mistake their music for Fela Kuti’s music, if for no other reason than they’ve dropped most of the beat from their Afrobeat. It’s there mostly in the guitar, and frankly it’s window dressing. Artificial flavoring. They’re to Afrobeat what Harry Belafonte’s “The Banana Boat Song” was to Calypso. They didn’t immerse themselves in the stuff the way Rhymin’ Simon or Byrne/Eno or Peter Gabriel for that matter did. It was a clever move on their part. Vampire Weekend kept the frothy pop front and center. Stayed as Caucasian as Loudon Wainwright III. Then stood back and let the people looking for a frisson of the world music exotic fight for the last copy in the record store.
I’m always reading about how smart and clever Vampire Weekend’s lyrics are. Hokum. Simon’s lyrics are smart and clever, and pack an emotional impact to boot. And while they sing about what they know—college life—they don’t have terribly interesting things to say about it. There isn’t a single funny bong story on the album! What were these losers doing, cramming for exams? The collegiate smartasses in the other whitest band in the world, Steely Dan, had fabulously smart and clever things to say about higher education. Namely that it was a waste of time. “My Old School” is a song with something to say about your alma mater, namely run away from it as fast as you can and never, ever go back. Belle & Sebastian also had wonderfully perverse and clever things to say about school life.
But after listening to Vampire Weekend what do I have? “Who gives a fuck about the English comma?” And that’s it. You get lots of lazy observations and bland commentary on life as an undergraduate in New York City, but rich, detailed and funny these songs ain’t. They don’t make me laugh. They don’t shoot me smack in the third eye with diamond bullet insights. They don’t paint fascinating character studies or tell great anecdotes or get catty or go nitrous oxide goofy on ya. Their lyrics aren’t dumb, which is a plus, and they’re more than placeholders for better lyrics they lacked the skill or energy to come up with, but mostly they’re so negligible they don’t even leave impressions on mirrors.
As for the songs, they’re Paul Simon lite. Not overly ambitious, which is good because Vampire Weekend are not cut out for the deep end of the pool, and it’s to their credit that they know it. So they keep them succinct, melodic, and charmingly boring. On “Mansard Roof” they sound like they’re riding a banana boat across Central Park. But talk about smart. They know what a mansard roof is! I don’t! What were they, real estate majors? Naw, only an English major could have come up with “Oxford Comma,” which has a old-school rap simple drum thing going on and includes the inexplicable line “Why would you lie about how much coal you have?” This one may catch you, but it would never bite you—it’s far too polite. And the simple little guitar line, which turns into a simple little guitar solo, is my cue to turn the song off every time.
The much-vaunted “A-Punk” is The Police for rent-a-cops. Is it supposed to have punch? Is that “Look outside at the raincoats coming, say, ‘Oh’” code? Why does the song sound so rickety and ramshackle, like a lean-to made of brittle charm? Why does Ezra Koenig sound like he’s singing with a fake accent? And is “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” really, as Koenig has said, about “colonialism and the aesthetic connections between preppy culture and the native cultures of places like Africa and India”? Of course it is, he said so! All I know is the repeated Afrobeat riff wears out its welcome within 30 seconds. And what does he mean when he sings, “But this feels so unnatural/Peter Gabriel too”? Besides the obvious fact that Gabriel is an unindicted co-conspirator on the list of Vampire Weekend’s bloodless white influences?
Vampire Weekend goes chamber pot chamber pop on “M79,” which is breezy and a vapid weekend indeed despite the “quaint” harpsichord and sweeping strings, which unfortunately fail to sweep the song out the door fast enough. Was the world really waiting for Afrobeat chamber pop fusion music? It was! We’re fucked! I feel nauseous! And don’t even get me started on “Campus,” with its unforgettable “I’ve got to leave here before I go.” It’s your standard Joe College “I never want to see you again” bust-up song with tinny drums. And Koenig is sleeping after class why exactly? Because he’s as bored as I am?
Is that “Bryn” as in Bryn Mawr? No, it’s a girl! And Koenig has fireflies in his heart! This one makes me think of Coldplay, the other other whitest band in the world, but I love Coldplay and I don’t love this! That guitar figure drives me crazy! Christopher Thompson’s drums are all over “One (Blake’s Got a New Face),” which for lack of viable competition I’m going to call the best song on the album. I like the way the backing vocalists echo Koenig’s repetition of “Blake’s got a new face” (there, I like something, now leave me alone!). And the closing lines (“Oh your collegiate grief/Has left you dowdy in sweatshirts/Absolute horror”) may even be a joke! And a kinda almost but not really funny one! Why, it almost made my drop my vial of protective holy water! And you can rattle your necklace of garlic to the beat!
“I Stand Corrected” is about Koenig’s lax fact checking and is as tedious and lazy an exercise in songcraft as e’er I’ve heard, which he basically admits with the line “Lord knows I haven’t tried.” Which would make a great title for a Morrissey song, and makes me think that if Koenig had stopped trying COMPLETELY the two of us might have made great dorm roommates. Except no way was I getting into the Ivy League because I stopped trying in third grade, and last I checked they don’t give out scholarships for excellent bongsmanship!
In the breakneck “Walcott,” Koenig urges a friend to flee Cape Cod because staying there would be insane! Even New Jersey is better! But when he sings “Walcott, fuck the women from Wellfleet/Fuck the bears out in Provincetown” does he mean “screw ‘em” or “have sex with them”? Because if he’s telling the bears of Provincetown to fuck off he’d better watch himself! They call them bears for a reason! And I’ll bet you the women in Wellfleet could kick this Walcott dweeb’s ass too! On this one Koenig shows signs of having a sense of humor, and it’s quite reassuring, but when he gets down to the nitty gritty he loses me. What does he mean when he sings “The lobster’s claw is sharp as knives/Evil feasts on human lives/The Holy Roman Empire roots for you”? I don’t have a clue! Maybe he’ll be a nice guy and send me a letter and tell me!
Koenig saves his best Sting impression for closer “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance.” I’m assuming the kids are his Ivy League contemporaries, who don’t stand a chance against the corporate recruiters come to wile them with promises of lucrative careers post-graduation. This is the unspeakable tragedy of privilege—the ruthless come not to make you work shit jobs in the service industry, but to make you rich! It’s enough to break your heart! But we all have a choice. It’s like The Mekons sang: “Destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late.” And there are literally thousands of ways to do it, most of which are big downward mobility fun! Become a junkie like Harvard grad William Burroughs and go on to write books with talking assholes in them! Or join a rock ’n’ roll band! But not Vampire Weekend because they’re even safer than a career in banking!
“The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” epitomizes the problem with Vampire Weekend—their perch at the top of the social status totem pole has blinkered them to the wonderful possibility of saying fuck it and throwing down with the rest of us losers. You don’t have to trudge the corridors of Mammon! You don’t even need a major label record contract! All you need is the willingness to make a flamboyant failure of yourself! And isn’t there something condescending about a barely-out-of-college punk calling his virtual peers kids? And saying they don’t stand a chance when he walked away easy peasy? Do this Koenig fella and his band mates really think they’re the only goddamn Ivy Leaguers in history with the chutzpah to escape the corporate juggernaut? The hubris!
Look, I’m not the only person Vampire Weekend has made miserable. They’ve ruined lives, and I have the victim impact statements to prove it. Probably the most poignant (and frankly heartbreaking) one comes from Gillian Cornelius, a sweet soul I’ve known for years: “Every single time I hear Vampire Weekend announced on the radio, I get excited thinking they’re going to play Big Thief’s excellent song, “Vampire Empire.” Then, disappointment sets in and I have to change the station. Vampire Weekend are criminally dull. Why are they so popular?”
This is the million dollar question. And she’s only one of the millions of confused and disaffected. My pal David Meyer complained, “Their music has very little bite to it, so the name is false advertising.” Right he is, but the fact remains that there are millions of people out there who love them precisely because they don’t want to listen to music that draws blood. How else to explain the popularity of Tame Impala, Cage the Elephant, Slow Coast and too many other indie acts (Local Natives anyone?) to mention? And who am I to judge them? Maybe boring is the new hip and nobody told me! But if you’re looking for the adventurous, for a band with real bite, Vampire Weekend is a fang-less proposition.
So take precautions. Whatever you do, don’t invite them into your house. And heed the advice of my pal Patrick Adrian, who told me “I spend Vampire Weekends placing sharpened wooden stakes and garlic bulbs around my stereo.” Because in one sense their name is totally appropriate. Vampire Weekend will suck the lifeblood out of you and leave you feeling so listless you’ll think their music is exciting. Now that’s genius!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D+
