Dapper, Privileged and Unapologetic
In retrospect, it should have always been clear that the polarizing New York indie-rock band Vampire Weekend had a little bit of ska in its DNA. Later iterations of that genre, revived every decade or so, gave secondhand consumption a bad name, its manhandling of reggae signifiers the laziest and most regrettable sort of musical borrowing.
It can be a gateway genre, though, to something more ambitious, which is what Vampire Weekend achieved on its 2008 self-titled debut album, a blissful, enthusiastic, careful — and to some, offensive — blend of African, British and American styles. Plenty got there before Vampire Weekend, but few got there with more panache or better clothes.
Daring to dress well turned out to be as much of a liability for the band members — Ezra Koenig, who sings and plays guitar; the multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij; the bassist Chris Baio; and the drummer Christopher Tomson — as fiddling around with Afropop, which smacked of cultural tourism. In an indie-rock environment that eschews the clean-cut, natty nonchalance can look a lot like entitlement, especially when emanating from a band of mostly white Ivy League-educated young men with good posture.
But there was no denying the ease of that album. Vampire Weekend’s music — appealingly leisurely, technically accomplished and pinprick precise — was difficult to impugn. Privilege sounded thrilling.
That remains true on “Contra” (XL), the group’s second album, which was released last week. Slicker and riskier and sometimes deeper than its predecessor, it’s full of modern, open-minded indie rock that’s not scared of pop — or much else, for that matter. There’s residue of African influence, and also of hip-hop, new wave, Latin, Indian and Jamaican sounds, in refreshing combinations that are almost never belabored.
Mr. Koenig has a beautiful, lithe voice, and he’s pushing it in new directions, tossing in Bollywood phrasings on “I Think Ur a Contra,” which sounds like Vampire Weekend’s attempt at writing a Maxwell song, and spitting out cackling darts on “Cousins.” On “California English” he runs it through Auto-Tune.
As timely as the band’s debut was, little about it, apart from some lyrics, coded the present. “Contra” is of the moment, thanks to its expanded palette — Mr. Tomson tries out a trademark reggaeton stutter beat on “Run” — and also to Mr. Batmanglij, on keyboards and synthesizers mainly, and his new-wave revival flourishes. (There are mild echoes of his electro-soul side project, Discovery, which released its debut album, “LP,” on XL last year.)
Even as it surprises, though, “Contra” is chilly. It’s less jolting, less vital than the band’s debut — some of the group’s focused intensity has been lost.
That’s echoed in Mr. Koenig’s lyrics, which are far richer here, but also more skeptical: his patrician faith has been shaken. On Vampire Weekend’s debut, he was often the judge, imperiousness delivered politely with dulcet singing and casual cultural dismissal. It was the project of someone who, through book learning and attitude and no small amount of practice, had set himself above his peers.
“Contra” tracks the death of an arriviste dream — nothing that was strived for on the last album turned out to be worth the desire. “Giving Up the Gun” is cynical about fame’s impermanence, a look into the future through the lens of a washed-up former hero.
Mostly, though, Mr. Koenig is interested in the nexus of love struggles and class struggles, as heard on a dispiriting but entrancing run in the middle of the album.
It begins with “California English,” a blindingly quick, African-inflected punk song. “Your father moved cross the country just to sunburn his scalp,” Mr. Koenig sings, touching on multiple sorrows: aging, loneliness, balding. Then the money disappears, too, with reference to “a condo that they’ll never finish.” Here and there, Auto-Tune adds sweetness to his bite.
That’s followed by the album’s tragic center, “Taxi Cab,” a dreamy, slow breather. It’s about a mismatched relationship, but it reads like a mea culpa for the band’s aesthetic decisions, acknowledging that the price of ambition was the moral high ground:
When the taxi door was open wide
I pretended I was horrified
By the uniform and gloves outside
Of the courtyard gate
You’re not a victim
But neither am I
After that comes “Run,” which begins as reggaeton homage and slowly morphs into a bleeping shuffle that could be a La Roux club hit. “She said, ‘You know/there’s nowhere left to go,’ ” Mr. Koenig sings, then turns hopeful. “But with her fund/It struck me that the two of us could/Run!”
Run where, though? Not away from the stains of privilege. Vampire Weekend will be saddled with that attachment until it splits up, even if it reconfigures as a Kraftwerk cover band, or the Roots. (Though that won’t be for a while: beginning on Sunday the band will play three sold-out dates in New York.) Rolling Stone, in its review of “Contra,” compared Vampire Weekend’s albums to Wes Anderson movies. When band members wore sweaters during a “Saturday Night Live” performance, they were pilloried.
So be it. At a rowdy show in 2008 Mr. Koenig sang a couple of songs with a well-regarded, profanely named Canadian punk band. He wore a plaid shirt and khakis, and kept them crisp even as damp moshers enveloped him.
It was a performance as nervy as Sacha Baron Cohen’s middle-America immersion stunts as Brüno, but without the disdain. Why can’t a bourgeois-inclined kid embrace sweaty Canadian punk rock? It’s no less likely than his being a Lil Wayne fan, and probably more likely than his opting for Michael Bublé or Lang Lang.
In the two-and-a-half years since Vampire Weekend’s debut EP first appeared, a wave of world-scavenging aristo-indie has emerged, most of it pale by comparison. And while there’s been no shortage of well-educated indie-rock bands over the last 20-plus years, rarely do they peacock. In a world that prizes modesty, Vampire Weekend dared to not be humble.
Mr. Koenig thrills to the dissonance, and is careful to keep cultivating it. “Horchata,” which opens the new record, has characteristically upturned-middle-finger rhymes: horchata, balaclava, Aranciata, Masada. A stunt, as careful as any Cam’ron lyric, it’s in no way blithe. Rather it’s virtually a taunt to lazy detractors: we are exactly the band you think we are, and yet so much wiser.
Indifference to critique isn’t for everyone. This is a band that’s comfortable — comfortable lifting from a variety of sources and comfortable with people complaining about said lifting. Comfort is a byproduct of privilege, and privilege is a byproduct of money, sometimes, but as often of education and acculturation.
Privilege also means never having to say you don’t belong, which is why Vampire Weekend will never apologize for its palette, even if it were a good idea to do so, which it isn’t. (Well, maybe one is in order for the soca-like “Giant,” the iTunes bonus track, which opens with a Notorious B.I.G. quotation.) The band even samples the knee-jerk cultural-politics instigator M.I.A. on “Diplomat’s Son,” making her complicit — she must have signed off on it — with a band that, on paper, she should hate. Resistance must be futile.
It feels like the final frontier of appropriation: maybe there’s nowhere left to go but back to the beginning. In a recent interview with The Village Voice, Mr. Tomson unearthed the band’s affection for late-period ska revival bands like Operation Ivy, and also Sublime, about as close as you can get to a four-letter word when discussing influences, short of mentioning 311. On “Cousins” and “Holiday,” he and his band mates prove to be faithful to that source material, unfussy and almost tolerable. Perhaps it could be the beginning of their reformatting as a far less complicated, and less troublesome band: Skampire Weekend.
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