Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

When your band has the word vampire in its name, you’re inviting your audience to make certain assumptions. There’s an expectation that everyone in the band is going to be dressed in black and that you’ll probably cover “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” at some point. There’s even an expectation that one or possibly all of the members of your band had an inappropriate relationship with their high school drama coach.

Vampire Weekend happily defies all of these expectations. The band is so far from the Gothic images their name suggest that they might very well be termed an anti-Goth band. Their first full length, self-titled album is up-tempo and enjoyably earnest.

The members of this four piece all met while attending Columbia University and came to prominence on a host of music blogs. The band describes their sound as “Upper West Side Soweto.”

Here’s where I’m kind of cynical. If a band describes their sound as something like “Upper West Side Soweto” there’s a little piece of me that immediately thinks, “Gimmick.” Like maybe the band is trying a little too hard to carve out a niche for themselves instead of just letting the music speak for itself. I can honestly say, though, listening to Vampire Weekend, you don’t get the feeling that these boys are trying to get by on a gimmick. The African influences, while noticeable, tend to get folded into their surroundings pretty easily. In a song like “The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance” they practically become an afterthought, surrounded, as they are, by faux reggae-isms, harpsichord sounds, and full on orchestral movements.

Lead singer Ezra Koenig walks in two worlds throughout most of the album. In songs like “M79” and “Walcott”, he employs your standard indie-rock vocal stylings - the kind of thing you’ve heard a million times before. But in other songs, like “Bryn” and “Oxford Comma”, Koenig’s voice takes on a crooning quality. His vocals become suave and disarming. It’s not a forced thing, like he’s trying to make you take notice.

Pushing past the crooning and the afro-pop vibes, there’s something else living inside the band’s sound. There’s something audibly Ivy League about their music. As if you can imagine somewhere on their way towards becoming burned out grad students or the President of the United States, these guys decided to chuck it all and form a band instead.

Songs like “Campus” and “One” transport the listener back in time to their own Ivy League experience where days were spent wasted on the lawn, getting high in corduroy blazers and flicking cigarettes at the rowing team. Never mind the listener never actually attended an Ivy League school, but instead spent a couple of years at a junior college before dropping out to work at their uncle’s fabric store. It’s quite a trick.

The album’s greatest weakness is how insubstantial it feels. It’s a pop album, through and through. The songs’ lack of pretense, while refreshing to a degree, results in a lack of power, ultimately. While not as insubstantial as most of the pabulum you’ll hear on mainstream radio, you don’t get the feeling that this album has any real staying power. In a time when the internet has opened the musical flood gates wide and threatens to drown the planet with access to an untold number of new bands, making a record that hits with a splash but is ultimately forgettable may be a fatal misstep. Hopefully future releases will give the listener a little something more to invest in than a clever sound.