The first song on Vampire Weekend’s new record is called “Horchata” where the title beverage serves as a gentle reminder that, no, Ezra Koenig and company haven’t been sweating too much over the economic crises. Instead they’ve been celebrating the newfound fame and success that they rightfully won with their brilliant self-titled debut, an exuberant resurrection of Afro-beat production and snarky lyrics that reminded critics of Graceland and me of Talking Head ’77. So if they’ve been celebrating and making money doing what they love, why is the cinnamon-rice-milk-themed opening cut of Contra so sad? The answer is simple: because Contra is a decidedly and artificially more mature record than its predecessor.
All across the board this is a more focused and production-savvy effort than the debut. We get the beefed up guitars, pounding drums and confident singing of a real rock band. The songs are much longer with hummable choruses and bridge anthems, ska rhythms and M.I.A. samples. On “California English” they even integrate their indie rollick with Auto-tune. That’s right auto-tune! The symbol of misguided pop artists everywhere! This amalgam of new sounds makes the record an often-interesting listen, and with the 80’s inspired “Giving Up the Gun” they could be reaching out for some radio play. This is definitely the kind of larger record which will see them expanding their fan base greatly, and if the first record was too idiosyncratic for you, this one might have some easier points of entry into the band’s aesthetic: “White Sky”, my favorite on the record, has the Paul Simon guitar work and inspired vocal hooks which first drove people to the band while maintaining a steady rhythm and good melodic sense. But I didn’t like the first record because I’ve long been craving the days when Peter Gabriel fans would be vindicated for their belief in the emotive powers of African flutes. I liked it because the lyrics were really clever and the songs were a lot of fun.
While a few songs maintain the fun (“Cousins” in the moment most reminiscent of the first album) most drag in gloomy maturity and the lyric sheet of this record just kind of sucks. “Holiday” and “Taxi Cab” still commit to the band’s detailed descriptions without adding up to anything, the stories just sit there. The songs don’t say much and feel weighty once the spectacle of their production wears away (around the 3rd or 4th listen in my experience), which brings me back to that M.I.A. sample, the one in “Diplomat’s Son”. Why use it? It doesn’t benefit the song in anyway, it doesn’t reflect the themes in the song (something about privilege, sex, regret, and boredom), and it doesn’t go with the sound. Koenig probably decided that M.I.A. is cool and therefore using M.I.A. samples is cool under any circumstances. This kind of lazy attempt at credibility is wrought throughout the record. “Walcott” was a cool song so the band reinterprets it here as “Run”, but again it just doesn’t work, because they miss the point. “Walcott” a great song about cutting free of constraints because the narrator is just as trapped as the person he thinks he’s freeing. In the end neither Ezra nor Walcott could escape Cape Cod, and the song’s frantic melody reflected that tension. “Run” is just a simple construction of phrases that sound clever for awhile. There’s no real insight or conflict in lines like “we mostly work to live until we live to work”.
The record ends with “I Think UR A Contra” which turns an obscure political reference into a poignant moment of regret. “I just wanted you” Koenig laments and really hits home. Funnily enough, it’s the simplest lyric on the record. It goes to show that a beautiful song will always be more powerful than innovative production or oblique lyrics, something they often forget on Contra. They make a lot of pretty noise on this record, but only in these rare moments do they really say something. Older? Certainly. Wiser? If they are, they don’t show it on this go-around. 2.5/5
No comments:
Post a Comment