African-Indie Rock?: Vampire Weekend’s debut album

In a leap of faith from the pages of Rolling Stone, this debut album from a band deemed the “Best New Band of 2008” has had me stumped at what to say. For the short and dirty, I liked it and am curious for what the band will bring in the future but with that, there are some big issues that need to be addressed for the unsuspecting public.

Vampire Weekend is not your run of the mill band. They are not what anybody would call rock and are really beyond any kind of folk music I, as a reviewer, am familiar with. In a word, they are different. Stated as a being heavily influenced by African styled music, of which I have no experience, I am intrigued by the old world feel of the music. There are no catchy guitar rifts, overwhelmingly catchy chorus lines and other novelties we could recognize in popular music or even the more absurd underground styles. What we do have feels both old and new. If I was going to give simple comparisons, Vampire Weekend can be compared to other “non-linear” groups such as Arcade Fire and The Decemberists. For a more relative comparison to what we as a culture have gone through, Vampire Weekend is taking steps musically like the Talking Heads, which for now is like comparing Franz Ferdinand to The Beatles. Basically, it’s a new sound and it can be really intimidating to anybody. It could start a revolution of some kind but most likely not; it could just be an Indie group that suddenly hit it big and will fade like other bright stars.

The album has a decent flow from song to song, showing a diverse array of sounds and “funk” if that’s what it is. “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” is early enough in the album to show how strange the music can get, lyrically and musically, if “Mansard Roof” didn’t already lead you to that conclusion. The jumpy lyrics can be annoying at times and always leave me feeling like I’m not listening hard enough to understand the song meaning. It doesn’t stay like that though and the songs are really easy to listen to half heartedly.

As a person, I feel very undecided in suggesting this album simply because it’s something so new and different. As a reviewer though, this is a definite must buy because of those exact same reasons which is pretty funny. Simply put, it’s a good album, I enjoy listening to it and it lends itself to a new wave of music. It’s not a safe rock album, if it is rock, but it’s something that can change viewpoints on what is actually good music.