Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

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

Just heard Diane Young for the first time. My goodness that is a good song.

yeah it rules... i would almost go as far to say that nothing in their previous albums prepared me for it. although, i should disclose that i was always weirdly prejudiced against this band because the drummer went to my high school and this like, caused me to see them as super obnoxious and preppy. with time i learned that i don't really care about that stuff though. my high school experience wasn't that bad.

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

ftr this might be the most wrong thing i have EVER seen written about this band. TIM....

Here's another insufferable piece: The New Yorker asks, like, should I even bother?

digital rockabilly is always dope. I kind of wanna sing "Jack U Off" over "Diane Young" tho.

man i feel 4 that critic. like who has 70 minutes to listen to those first two albums and correct the blind spot when you have to write a piece about how you haven't heard 70 minutes worth of music.

Here's another insufferable piece: The New Yorker asks, like, should I even bother?

― @GracieLoPan #fyi (Display Name (this cannot be changed):),

I'm so sorry I read this.

i can't wait for sfj tell-all piece about how he's never actually listened to an album all the way through. and then david denby will write one about how he always falls asleep during movies with subtitles... it would be a cool new direction for the New Yorker.

Couldn't resist commenting on the NYer piece...

On first listen it sounded subdued, but I was at work and not properly focusing on it. Liking it ten times better on headphones right now.

I might be completely off the mark (not as much as moodles who compared them to Sublime) but the sound of this album reminds me of Spoon, albeit less antiseptic. Which has always been my beef with Spoon, I want to like them but they always sound too controlled.... too tight. VW dont seem to have this problem.

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

ftr this might be the most wrong thing i have EVER seen written about this band. TIM....

― flamenco drop (lex pretend), Wednesday, 8 May 2013 00:06 (6 hours ago) Permalink

I'm not claiming that he does this on "Diane Young", it's more an album track kinda thing, but I wouldn't expect you to agree with me in any event obv.

He's good at writing evenhanded studies of flawed characters.

Finally listening and this album is kind of tremendous btw.

Fastnbulbous
5 hours ago
If the New Yorker stopped paying you to write about music you can't be bothered to listen to, that would not be a tremendous loss either.

Ha ha

Lex, have you listened to Vampire Weekend long enough to know whether Tim's observation is right or not? I doubt it. I think he's otm about Ezra's emotional intelligence, which has always been underrated.

i've listened to enough VW to know that he has a fucking horrible voice

i also discovered last week he does fake patois on the major lazer album ;_;

Thank you for your insights.

Good Ezra line in the Pitchfork interview: "The perfect tone is halfway between deeply serious and totally fucking around. If you don’t give Vampire Weekend credit for any type of self-awareness or humor, you’re always going to have this crazy impression of us.”

http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/9125-vampire-weekend/

lex get ouuuuut we're not trolling dawn richard threads

xpost I don't mind that New Yorker piece. Tons of music I feel I should have listened to that I just haven't. Nice to see someone admitting it for a change. If you work in an office where playing music isn't possible, and have a family rather than living in a garret, then keeping up with things is all but fucking impossible simply because the opportunities to listen to music properly are so rare. Now I do much more writing than editing, I listen to less and less, because I'm generally having to listen fairly closely to what I'm actually writing about, rather than casting around to see what's good and what's not.

You're right about how hard it is to keep up, but the manner in which Greenman penned that kinda bugs me.

But it only takes 70 minutes to catch up on their catalogue

Why would he lie about how much time he had? Why would he lie about something dumb like that?

Lol

lol

Greenman piece is reasonable to me, and I can totally relate to it.

Ditto. Some things I decide not to hear / investigate. Always been the case.

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

ftr this might be the most wrong thing i have EVER seen written about this band. TIM....

― flamenco drop (lex pretend), Tuesday, May 7, 2013 5:06 PM Bookmark

I kind of want Ezra Koenig to write a song about lex now.

"I Think Ur A Contra" IIRC

Ha ha. Lex is such a contra.

i think he's more of a samantha

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/22443178

9.3 on Pitchfork. Blimey.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17963-vampire-weekend-modern-vampires-of-the-city/

One thing I miss is the sharpness of Contra, the way each song was its own soundworld with each and every detail etched perfectly. In some ways that album felt observationally more acute because it was more acute sonically.

Modern Vampires is messier, more diffuse, that overexposed (in the photograph sense, not the popular culture sense) drum sound creating a constancy in vibe and feel that perhaps is laudable in its own right but also makes the songs less singular - like, I love both "Don't Lie" and "Everlasting Arms", but it's not like you need both of them. It feels by comparison like a self-indulgent sprawl even though most of the songs are shorter and less expansive (though not less surprising or idiosyncratic).

And then on the other hand I do think the band is getting better (or more focused on?) liberating those emotional cut-throughs, the kind of capture-yr-life-in-a-snowglobe effect of "Giving Up The Gun" seems to crop up a lot here, though obv most intensely on "Ya Hey" (which I adore its irritations notwithstanding).

It would be very hard for me at this point to say where/how I rate the album vis a vis their prior work.

I daresay the third XX album will be similar in that regard.

Why do you say that? It doesn't feel like the band's trajectories based on their respective first two albums are even remotely similar.

Now I.gotta read Koenig's blog.

You only read it for the articles, right?

Interested by that comment re: the lack of singularity in the songs. Maybe there's a more pervasive sense of darkness and melancholy but stylistically, this album's got pitch-shifting 50s rock'n'roll and Walkmen-style emotional ballads and then weird, creepy curveballs like "Hudson" - it's certainly not void of variation

Yeah I didn't mean it's not varied, more that the songs don't feel so self-contained. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Often it's only when a new album comes out that it allows me to understand more specifically what it is that made the previous album special to me.

I feel all three albums complete each other very well, DL is otm with how it 'traces the emotional arc between the ages of 20 and 27 to perfection.'