Vampire Weekend, 2010's Contra, and 2013's Modern Vampires in the City). The band has released 2 EPs ( Vampire Weekend, 2007 The Kids Don't Stand A Chance, 2008) and three studio recordings (2008's The band has influences of afro-pop and to a lesser extent Western classical music,īlended with their own breed of sound, often put under the umbrella term Indie rock. Listening close will reveal interesting cultural details.Vampire Weekend is an Indie band formed in 2006 in New York. Vampire Weekend isn’t just great background music. They took some combination of a Billy Joel song, a Drake song and the most popular hashtag on Twitter and made an emotional, complex, even bizarre album – in the best way. Probably not the image Drake had in mind when he wrote “The Motto,” but this is what Vampire Weekend does – and they do it now more than ever: They take in culture and put out interesting music. This is Vampire Weekend’s YOLO: a sad sap trying to pry his way into a married woman’s life. Relatively slow tempo and images of frailty in the lyrics, such as, “Young hips shouldn’t break on the ice,” make the singer’s plea sound rather pitiful. He tries to convince a married woman to leave her husband because death is fast approaching all of us (“Dial up, three rings, and return him his gold … There’s a headstone right in front of you / And everyone I know”). Where Joel is slick, the character in “Don’t Lie” is depressing. And the whole thing accomplishes the 'interrogating God' thing that they set out to do as early as Obvious Bicycle, where the multiple and extended utterances of 'Listen' felt like a. Then, he very chivalrously offers his services (“I might as well be the one”). Some of their best writing is in Step, Hannah Hunt, Ya Hey, and Hudson. Joel tries to get a catholic girl’s virginity by warning her she might die without ever doing it. Blogger Matthew Perpetua described the album’s theme as YOLO, but with grimmer overtones.Ĭonsider “Don’t Lie,” which is like Vampire Weekend’s version of Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” (an OK comparison considering how much Koenig wrote on his college blog about Joel). While the self-titled album tackles comma usage, and Contra mocks a suburban girl’s booshie, all-natural toothpaste, Modern Vampires is about death, growing up, death, God and more death: Dying, dying young, the setting sun or ticking clocks appear in almost every song. Modern Vampires is more solemn than Vampire Weekend’s other two albums. Also, it’s not an outtake from an album like “Giant ” the band confidently put “Step” near the front of Modern Vampires as if to say, “This is who we are: We make harpsichord music out of hip-hop.” Unlike Vampire Weekend’s earlier tribute songs like “Giant” and “One,” “Step” takes not just a lyric but also the melody from its parent song. Then, Koenig comes in singing words about a “girl” who’s really a music collection. Batmanglij composes a harpsichord and organ background that follows the Souls of Mischief tune. So, the song is already a stack of musical reinterpretations when Vampire Weekend’s keyboardist/producer Rostam Batmanglij adds something of his own. 1, a position that would become familiar.
With hits like the polyrhythmic Horchata and the feverishly paced Cousins, Vampire Weekend’s second LP, Contra, went to No. It riffs on Souls of Mischief’s “Step to My Girl,” which itself samples saxophonist George Washington, Jr.’s cover of “Aubrey,” by Bread. The album hit the Top 20, and the single Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, with its name-checking of Peter Gabriel, was wryly covered by Gabriel himself. “Step,” one of Modern Vampires‘s singles, is a tribute to ’90s rap group Souls of Mischief. If Vampire Weekend’s latest album, Modern Vampires of the City, doesn’t sound like the old Vampire Weekend, that’s because Koenig and company are getting more comfortable with their genre-bending, strange-sounding habit. But, as of late, the band is taking more risks with their sound, and it has a growing habit of appropriating music from unexpected places. Songs like “Giant” and “One” were subtle. or Metallica and repurposing it into a song in their strange, but catchy, brand of baroque pop. Vampire Weekend has been doing this since before they blew up: taking a scrap of music from as far away as B.I.G.
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