Vampire Weekend Contra (XL)
4/5
By: Matt Tomiak
It’s kind of ironic that here in the UK, the second Vampire Weekend album is released concurrently with a horrendously glib Conservative Party election campaign featuring leader David Cameron's furrow-browed features staring down in pseudo anguish from expensively assembled hoardings around the UK. True, there's a comparably well-heeled young lady in a Ralph Lauren shirt gazing out from the cover of Contra. But NYC quartet Vampire Weekend, so widely and unfairly maligned for their upper-middle class upbringings and cultural appropriation of African influences, represent an altogether more palatable example of the public face of sons of privilege than Mr. Cameron, a man so memorably described by legendary Brit satirist Armando Iannucci as “a bum-faced southern ponce with a tiny washer for a mouth.”
Their most famous song ‘Oxford Comma’ might have concerned itself with grammatical pedantry, yet some of the best moments on the bands 2008's eponymous debut weren't exactly mired in preppy exclusivity. Beneath the galloping arpeggios and collegiate references of 'Campus', for example, lay singer Ezra Koenig’s starkly non-elitist sentiments -"How am I supposed to pretend/ I never want to see you again?. It’s not like you need an Ivy League education to identify with that sort of thing.
They’re not letting all that metropolitan posh-boy stuff lie, though. ‘California English’ contains some rapid-fire references to private schools and French Connection that feels like a calculated effort to rile those who felt the debut wore its wordy erudition too proudly, whilst ‘Cousins’ flaunts the band’s knowledge of UK New Wave by appropriating XTC’s lurching ‘Generals and Majors’ (something of a trend in acclaimed latter-day US indie rock, this; isn’t Dirty Projectors’ ‘Stillness In The Move’ essentially ‘Making Plans For Nigel?’). And even the most trenchant class warrior would have a hard time denying the delights of lead single ‘Horchata’ or the irresistible ‘Giving Up The Gun’.
A follow-up LP with all the charm, immediacy and pop nous of the first, ‘Contra’ can be counted a resounding success and the first great album of 2010. Let’s just hope Davey C and co aren’t going to be bopping along to this record come Election Day…
Stream the album on Rockfeedback.
Artists in this article: Vampire Weekend
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