“I could sleep wherever I lay my head.”
Like many, I was taken by the ebullient swagger of ‘A-Punk’ and ‘Oxford Comma’ and ‘Mansard Roof’ from Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut; but the vibrant and idiosyncratic Contra is what really set the hooks for me. Expanding on the guitar-oriented, African-influenced pop style set forth on their first album, Ezra Koenig and co. tentatively, with considerable creative ambition and to stunning effect, embrace autotune, looped samples, and drum machines. ‘Cousins’, a strident surf-rocker, is perhaps the only number here that captures the same peppy magic of the older material. Otherwise, this is a subtly transformed outfit, relying less on hooks and riffs and more on texture, melody, and tonal shifts. It borrows liberally from a wide variety of genres—Afropop, Latin, ska, baroque, synth, folk, dreampop, sampledelia, calypso—but each influence is subsumed into a coherent style.
The album’s title, invoking opposites and contrasts and juxtapositions (as well as a Nicaraguan rebel group and the deliriously fun but also punishing Contra for the original Nintendo Entertainment System), is reflected in its conflicted lyrics, its varied vocal deliveries, its fluctuations between earnest confessions and witty wordplay, its mash-up of sincerity and kitsch, and its sometimes jagged integration of analog and digital sounds.
Koenig, who pens most of the band’s lyrics, has moved on from college life and the unreleased indie film the band stole its name from and now seems concerned with his place in the society. What do our habits and possessions say about us? What constitutes a person? All of the consumerist symbols with which they surround themselves? But in other respects not all that much has changed. “Sweet carob rice cakes, you don’t care how the sweets taste. Fake philly cheesesteak but you use real toothpaste,” he sings, autotuned, on ‘California English’. “‘Cuz if that Tom’s don’t work, if it just makes you worse, would you lose all of your faith in the good earth?” Translation: “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?”
With honorable mention given to drummer Chris Tomson (and my apologies to bassist Chris Baio for not mentioning him anywhere other than this benign parenthetical), the secret weapon is multi-instrumentalist/songwriter/producer Rostam Batmanglij, whose bold choices pay off in significant ways and allow the band to explore wide-ranging musical ideas within the context of a cohesive album. ‘Diplomat’s Son’ is a solid nutshell of his and Koenig’s compositional genius; the chopped vocal sample used as a riff, the gradual changes in instrumentation, the sudden shifts in tempo and energy, the majestic outro—it all paints the picture of the limitless creative potential we have as human beings. Or at least, the limitless creative potential that the members of Vampire Weekend have, paragons of human creativity that they are.
Of course, detractors like to point out that good fortune has afforded these dudes the opportunity to attend an Ivy League school and then form a band that sings about all sorts of ridiculous stuff and so therefore they are rich, fake, and pretentious. But really, they seem about as genuinely engaged with what they’re doing as any band out there. So what if they like Lord Kitchener and Toots and the Maytals and Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel and obscure bits of history and tongue twisters and literature and typefaces, and choose to incorporate those things into their music? What’s inauthentic about that? And anyway, even if they weren’t walking definitions of sincerity, Mick Jagger wudn’t no dyed-in-the-wool delta bluesman and Brian Wilson didn’t surf, and I love their music too, so I don’t care.
Neither as raw and youthfully exuberant as Vampire Weekend nor as refined and austere as Modern Vampires of the City, Contra tends to get overlooked, but it’s far from a sophomore slump. In fact, it’s quite the opposite—a gentler, more mature take on the same influences that formed the nucleus of their debut.
Favorite Tracks: Run; Giving Up the Gun; Diplomat’s Son.