Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend by: Justin Pearsall Sat:02-Aug-08 Label: XL Year: 2008 WB rating 86 out of 100

Vampire Weekend are an easy band to hate. For those of you who’ve only heard of the internet in the last six months, they’re the new ‘it’ band, and much like predecessors Artic Monkeys, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand and The Strokes, they’ve been eliciting mixed opinions – the New York City four-piece facing the hype, over-hype, has-been cycle that hits quicker these days before they’ve even released their debut album.

Vampire Weekend make the kind of music that will have all the indie snobs out there sharpening those sardonic one-liners: it’s ultra-catchy, slickly produced and all too fashionable (in snob jargon these terms are quickly spun into predictable, mass produced and faddish). But for those with less prejudicial hearing, the buzz behind this band is real and deserved. The flair with which they employ their unique brand of ‘Upper West Side Soweto’ – the band-chosen term to denote their Afro-Pop styling – suggests a real affinity with the rhythmic foundations of African music and a seamless synergy with the melodic focus of the West. Contextually, the band fly closer to traditional African music than a revisitation of the Talking Heads’ take on the genre.

All Calypso instrumentation, wired rhythms and the unmistakable, hook-heavy vocals of Ezra Koenig, ‘Mansard Roof’s short length (rounding out at just over two minutes) and use of strings makes the album’s opening track the audio equivalent of a movie trailer sans the dramatic voiceover: all you really need to know about Vampire Weekend can be garnered from this song. While the fact that similar sentiments can be made about other tracks, such as ‘Oxford Coma’ and ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’, may suggest a lack of diversity in the songwriting, this is not the case. From the house party aesthetic of ‘A-Punk’, ‘Walcott’s anthem ambitions, the 'Eleanor Rigby'-esque instrumentation of ‘M79’ and The Strokes-like chorus of ‘Campus’, Vampire Weekend channel a plethora of influences through a sound that is distinctly their own.

And let’s be clear here, despite the above name dropping, in this their debut album Vampire Weekend have created a sound that does not rely on revisionism – something which cannot be said of many of today’s indie notables. While it still fits into currently popular genres and touches upon some of the great bands of recent memory, their music fails to elicit those moments of ‘gee, that sounds like the Talking Heads’ which inflicted other hyped bands (namely Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) and has an element of originality that is the quintessential quality in all of their mega-hyped contemporaries – this factor both the prime reason for their immediate appeal and the inevitable hurdle facing sophomore albums, as the originality of the band’s first creations are aped by others and expected of them.

In Dan Osmolowski’s review of Please Quiet Ourselves self-titled debut this week, he remarks: "Not many musicians can lay claim to their first album being the best in their catalogue but where there are assertions and arguments for this to be the case, those albums have had a singular focus; they have benefited from judicious editing and a ruthless decision making process that threshes the figurative chaff from the seed."

In the case of Vampire Weekend, Dan’s required singular focus is something that seems to come naturally to this band, allowing their songwriting both currency and diversity. It is this seemingly spontaneous, instinctual trait that negates Dan’s second point in regards to Vampire Weekend. The relative ease of this debut never suggests that the band has strived for perfection or for the seamlessness of a great album – although undoubtedly a lot of thought and care has been taken in its creation. More so, Vampire Weekend sounds as if it is a collection of the band’s best songs, and the fact that these songs meld organically, working both in the singular and in the collective, is a characteristic of the album that is impossible to explain; something that relies upon the interaction and space of four people playing together as one.

Even for those rattled by the uber-hype, Vampire Weekend are a band worthy of your attention. They’re credible enough to deter the criticisms of pure superficiality and innovative enough to justify the hype. And while another positive review will only build the puff saturating this band, it is only the foolhardy (or the blinded indie snob) who will overlook the charms of Vampire Weekend.