Review: Vampire Weekend – Contra (2010)
Over the past year, I’ve tried introducing my office-mate to some music. When I introduced him to Vampire Weekend, he immediately took to it. In fact, he and his girlfriend both became fans. Later on, when I gave him a link to a stream of Contra, he casually told me he liked it, but immediately rushed to get tickets to a show on Stub Hub. At that point, I knew this album was going to be big. Huge, even. As a sort of indirect review-in-a-nutshell, though: Let’s not forget that the debut did sell the better part of a million records.
Contra is, in many ways, the archetypal sidestep-the-slump move for any once-feted band. First, they didn’t wait too long. The longer you go, the greater the likelihood that the next record will bomb — or at very least, be disappointing to some degree — sophomore or not. There are a million examples from every form of art and entertainment to suggest this is true. Take your pick from Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Chinese Democracy, or even Duke Nukem Forever, which, rather than being released, was simply canned after twelve agonizing years of supposed development. On the other hand, there are albums like Portishead’s excellent Third (which was a decade in coming after Dummy), but instances like this are well and truly the exception, not the rule. Even Let It Be, an unforgettable Beatles classic, is easily the worst of their latter-day studio offerings, and also, not surprisingly, the one that spent the most time in production.
Secondly, it’s a meted and sharp expansion of their songwriting that plays to their strengths as multi-instrumentalists. They favor the keys more on this record on tracks like “Horchata” and “Run”, but bust out the guitars for the barn-burning “Cousins,” which highlights Rastam Batmanglij’s incredible chops on the frets. Contra is, with a few exceptions, no less fun an affair than their first record, and that is a rarity worth beholding.
Vampire Weekend’s “White Sky,” from Contra.
These things make it a savvy step for VW. To assert that the songwriting hasn’t taken a slight decline here, however, would be an oversight. Their first record wasn’t far from a modern masterpiece, despite the mixed press it got from skeptical indie followers who disliked the image they were projecting, and the “direction” it took their claw-scraped genre borders. If the potential for a flowering Afro-pop sub-genre caused them consternation, I personally think they need not worry; a duplication of Vampire Weekend would have to be the most obvious cop on the market. Afro-pop was practically empty prior to 2008, and Ezra Koenig and his boys capitalized on it so wholly that any immediate followers could never mop up the scraps for even a token amount of credit. Vampire Weekend are, by all accounts, a rare aberration.
Contra may have debuted at #1 in its opening week — which make no mistake, is an incredible feat; it’s only the twelfth time an independent record has done it since 1991 — but it’s clearly, if not egregiously, the inferior album. Vampire Weekend was so casual, so off-the-cuff, that you actually felt a little richer listening to it. It sounds silly, but the humanizing language and stories, Columbia University references and stomping ground revisits were an incredible coagulant for their aristocratic New York image. Not only that, but the rowdy approach made their respective families’ indubitable wealth, with all the polos and scarves it entails, less of a point of contention. They were simply four guys in a pop-rock band who made a record with a definitive time and place.
Contra, by contrast, doesn’t capture that seamless experience in the same way, despite its impressive sonic palette. Moreover, the emotional connectivity of the last stretch of three tracks can’t touch the heartfelt ascent of Koenig’s chorus on tracks like “Bryn.” In truth, though, this is nitpicking; “Giving Up The Gun” is the only real misstep to speak of here. It’s not an unforgivably grating tune, it’s just that it sounds tremendously misplaced. If Brandon Flowers were singing it with his trademark Springsteen-esque, strained-rocker rasp, it’d pass dangerously easily for a Killers single. Despite lacking their debut’s breezy insouciance (“Oxford Comma,” “Campus”), however, the remainder of the tracklist is well worth the investment. Contra isn’t to be missed.
