Modern Vampires of the City

Vampire Weekend are a band that have always thrived on articulate disarticulation, sophisticated binaries of occident/orient, mainstream/underground, jocularity/solemnity; the mishmash, if you will. As a result, they’re as comfortable conjuring infectious nonsense-refrains to soundtrack Will Ferrell farces as they are delivering melodies and lyrics so heart-swellingly on-point that the frogs in your throat are singing the harmonies.

Consequently, it’s hard to go along with the tide of “mature third album” accolades adorning the arrival of Modern Vampires of the City.  Rather, you get the impression that they boarded this particular train back in 2006.  So, where have they ended up?  The LP is bookended by two of their most soporific, beautiful songs in the form of ‘Obvious Bicycle’ and ‘Young Lion’.  The former unfolds like a time-lapse video, opening with a beat like a pendulum that cuts out for contemplation before reaching a flourish as the song builds in texture and sound.  Ezra Koenig and Rostam Batmanglij’s vocals weave in and out, harmonising to implore “so listen up.  Don’t wait.”

Elsewhere, Irish-folk inflections, reggaeton grooves and a psychobilly freakout appear alongside their customary high-necked riffery, Brooklynite balladry, vocal pitch-shifts, and harpsichord jams.  Each approach possesses a measured control which ensures that these disparate aspects never upset the whole.  Not least the arabesque ‘Worship You’, which incessantly shifts gears from breakneck to stratospheric between verse and chorus, straddling its middle-Eastern backing cries, frenetic synthesised guitar solo, and Joshua Tree-esque grandiosity via a rumbling bedrock of marching drums.  In fact, the sheer confidence with which they’ve extended this melange of genres is one of the strongest and most rewarding elements of the band’s output to date.

“Vampire Weekend deliver melodies and lyrics so heart-swellingly on-point that the frogs in your throat are singing the harmonies.”

This is not least apparent in Koenig’s lyrical work.  Tracks like ‘Finger Back’ and ‘Step’ feature canny lyrical switch-ups which occasionally come across as smart-aleck witticisms, as well as the alternately ubiquitous and obscure reference points critiqued as a means to throw off people like Chris Baio’s “long-lost cousin” Steve Buscemi.  More strikingly and powerfully than on previous LPs, these idiosyncrasies are occasionally usurped by moments of directness, as typified by the emotionally shattering chorus of ‘Hannah Hunt’: “If I can’t trust you then damn it Hannah, there’s no future, there’s no answer.”

Where admiration falls into the great ball-bit of the besotted, though, are Vampire Weekend’s ventures into spirituality, where recurrent themes of faith, death and afterlife are consecrated on the album’s (and perhaps the band’s) crowning achievement, ‘Ya Hey’.  It captures a deep-set existential grief, a contradiction that works away at both the personal and international, with a celestial magnificence and utter lack of pretence that Time magazine is trying to deny Generation Y.  The Ivy League bozos who once rapped about “wack calzone” weren’t supposed to be able to sing with such nuanced supremacy about a world that fell out of love with God.  But they did.

With a longer gestation period than their previous work – the period after Contra contained everything from globe-trotting, DJ-sets and sitcom cameos to scrapped material, Diplo collaborations and romantic upheaval – it’s perhaps no wonder that time is a central trope of the record.  Ticking clocks, historicity, rushing and waiting are all crucial relay-points of the words and sounds Vampire Weekend relate.

Therein lies the one gripe with the record, as its pacing and cohesion is momentarily disturbed when the transcendence of ‘Ya Hey’ is followed by the brooding, quasi-industrial ‘Hudson’.  It’s an intriguing listen which is darker than any of their previous work, with the discomforting scuffle of industrial drums and samples evoking the funereal and enigmatic.  But, when counter-posed against both its predecessor and follow-up – the gorgeous and all-too-brief outro ‘Young Lion’ – this contrast feels a little like having the wrong lenses tested at the opticians, leaving the album’s conclusion feeling somewhat more depleted than glorious.

This aside, you can’t help but be mesmerised by the band’s achievement here.  One of Hollywood’s best-paid saps Zach Braff once declared through his Scrubs alter-ego J.D: “If my heart could write songs, they’d sound like these”.  Although this line was expended on Dido’s Life For Rent, it could just as easily be a near-perfect testimony for Modern Vampires of the City.

The internet has seemingly ruined our cultural capacity to formulate a definitive contemporary canon (in both a positive and negative sense), but I can’t shake the feeling that, genuinely, Vampire Weekend might’ve just composed a real contender for modern greatness.

Similar To: The Strokes, Grizzly Bear

MP3: ‘Hannah Hunt’, ‘Ya Hey’