Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

Second half of this record in bed at night gave me high school chills

Excited to listen to this - I bought and quickly forgot about Contra on release but then I recently pulled it out during one of those recent freaky snow storms and it sounded fantastic.

Loved the first two but think this is even better. To go from A-Punk to Ya Hey and still sound like themselves is some achievement and the lyrics have a weight that wasn't there before. If you string the three albums together they trace the emotional arc between the ages of 20 and 27 to perfection.

I agree - this album is tremendous and at least as good as (if not better than) the last two.

yeah, I don't know how the rest of the new album is but "ya hey" is very impressive in terms of depth and maturity in songwriting. I enjoy the first album with its cute lightness and silliness but this is something else (I have skipped the second though so they might have evolved a lot in-between). in other words, that's some heavy shit !

the chirping vocal in "Ya Hey" is the worst though

Agree, never need to hear that again

however I love the organ sound on "Everlasting Arms."

I appreciate how QUIET some of this is as opposed to say , Bankrupt.

gorgeous:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ps6TjI7ws0

I don't know how they operate so I might be mistaken here but to me this is first and foremost incredible work by Batmanglij.

Koenig's quiet riff under the organ, the bass = excellent.

the ballads on this aren't totally my jam but yeah this is pretty fucking good

"hudson" kinda dire tho

so is the one that sounds like Animal Collective

"diane young" is fucking dreadful

Annoyed the hell out of me at first.

Me too, and I love it now.

really like the chirping in "ya hey," it's just a neat trebly texture that already yelpy ezra can actually play against

the mirage-era buckingham comparison has caused me to enjoy this album even more, thanks tim

think of the first 15 seconds of "Eyes of the World," then play "Unbelievers," Brad.

"Diane Young" is a dehumanized (a-human?) take on Tusk's "That's Enough For Me" or "The Ledge," except it took the Mac a million bucks to sound that way.

wow otm

only heard "Diane Young" for the first time today & I love it

There's a Diane in Mirage too

Love the way Diane Young turns into Don't Lie.

Finger Back is very Lindsey Buck/Tusk sounding.

What is it about Koenig's vocals that makes it seem like he sees and understands all yr good parts and bad parts and how they fit together

Get ready: the first of the "think pieces" is up.

"when his voice cracks in the final verse, as the wilted relationship he's describing craters, it's a sign that Koenig is finally as invested in the emotional lives of his characters as he is in obsessing over their wardrobes and travel itineraries" -- lol oh rlly

not even gonna click

Haha that reads like a more pompous version of my immediately preceding post

jesus christ he was invested in the emotional lives of his characters, fuck that talk

was always*

Where once Koenig cared about Louis Vuitton now he cares about love and death

yeah i think this is all kinds of off the mark

the usual overestimation of lyrics, among other things

Let's face it, he's just the singer of Sublime reincarnated in the body of an upper class New York aesthete.

it's pretty clearly an album about god

And immigration, history, New York, love and death.

I like the Grantland review a lot actually. Only goes wrong by underrating the emotional investment of the earlier albums that he clearly wasn't that into. I think he gets this one right.

unbelievers, everlasting arms, finger back, worship you, ya hey, young lion - i count like a dozen or so references to god/divinity/faith/religion

"only goes wrong by underrating the emotional investment of the earlier albums that he clearly wasn't that into"

and this is a pretty big wrong to make

especially if your whole thesis is "it was like this before, now it's like this"

I don't mind that he likes this album best -- I question his assumptions.

Which ones?

that albums become deeper when lyrics abandon references to brands and clothes

This grantland think piece is terrible:
"Vampire Weekend's latest, Modern Vampires of the City (out May 14), defuses the conversation around the group's first two albums by walking away from it completely."

I agree that sets up too many false oppositions in order to explain why he suddenly likes VW rather than engaging with the first two albums again and realising that this is an evolution rather than a U-turn.

I just think Hyden's a good critic who makes a lot of smart points a, so I feel compelled to defend him from the "god this is terrible" pile-on.

oh he might be a good critic!

i like Diane Young and Ya Hey better than any of their other songs. I haven't listened to the whole record yet, but these songs are more sonically interesting, I think.

yeah hyden's just fine i just have a problem with a lot of his arguments on this partic. piece