Vampire Weekend – Contra
Okay, I think we all know what I think of the new Vampire Weekend stuff. So whilst none of this album is as bad as the risible Horchata, it’s still pretty shite, all told, so there’s no real need to discuss that much further I don’t think.
What does interest me about this record, however, is the sort of backlash it is generating. Not the size of the backlash, per se, but more the kind of backlash. I find myself shrinking away from it, having really and sincerely praised their first record, and I am not alone amongst the indie scribblers in the blogosphere.
It feels like rank hypocrisy, and perhaps that’s what it is, but the feeling this album and the band themselves seem to be generating at the moment is almost akin to revulsion. I remember when the Broken Records album came out and so many people wrote reviews, perhaps with three stars out of five awarded, but delivered with such distaste that they read like character assassinations. There was serious danger of fractured pelvises, people were back-pedalling so fast.
Partly, it also reminds me of the likes of the Streets. I’ve written in the past about how I was a big fan of Original Pirate Material when it was released, but by the time the second record came along I honestly couldn’t have dropped the band any faster if I had been holding Lindsay Lohan’s latest abortion. Listening back to the first record nowadays, it actually makes me wince to listen to. There’s something about the idiosyncrasy of the sound which means that either when the immediate enthusiasm around the release wore off, or the next record pushed it just a little too far, that the band seemed to flip from one state to another in my mind.
There may not be clear divisions between genres, sub-genres and styles in the world of music, but there are definitely clusters. It’s almost like interstellar objects. Many of them clearly orbit specific stars – the indie star, the folk star, whatever you like – but there are plenty of interstellar bodies which are not clearly in orbit of any single star. It’s almost as if some bands act like these objects, tantalisingly weaving through space, as we conjecture from what little we know of their path as to which stars might most be influencing their trajectory.
Particularly in this state, it is easy to be a bit geocentric and claim it to be orbiting our sun, or at least it is when you extend this rather tortured analogy to musical tribalism at least, especially if the band in question happen to write good (i.e. infectious) tunes.
However, by suddenly passing unusually close to a massive object, these bodies can either be captured in their orbit, or when a little more information comes to light about their actual trajectory it can become evident that they were actually orbiting them all along. I know I am stretching this a bit thin, and my grasp of cosmology is tenuous at best, but I am trying to describe that phenomenon when bands exist in quite an enigmatic space and seem, tantalisingly, for a while, to be ‘one of us’, only to later be revealed to be ‘one of them’, and that is the best I could come up with.
What I can’t explain is the hurt which people seem to feel when this kind of thing happens. Because the kind of spiteful backlash I saw against Broken Records (are they alternative or are they MOR), and which I personally felt against the Streets (is he ‘real’ or is he a cockney twat hamming it up for the cameras) and now genuinely feel against Vampire Weekend (are they innovators or tedious pastiche-mongers), can only come from some sort of feeling of betrayal, surely. People take their musical tastes very personally – it’s more of a statement about who we are than our houses or cars or clothes, for a lot of people, so maybe it’s not even that the band betrayed you, but that they conned you into betraying yourself.
The world of geezers and nightclubs and birds and so on fucking irritated the living shit out of me when I lived in London. Somehow, though, the newness of the sound of Original Pirate Material and the sudden accessibility of a genre I had never really clicked with cut through that and fascinated me long enough that it didn’t seem important when listening to the record. And besides, there’s no denying that Skinner captured that world with uncanny accuracy. Now that the novelty has worn off and it has been fixed in the chilly gaze of hindsight, all I can see is an album about a culture with which I have nothing in common and which I actually find genuinely irritating.
So Vampire Weekend? Well, the tunes on this album simply aren’t very good. On their debut the songs were really infectious, which brought an element of exuberance to their weird amalgalm of sounds. On Contra there is none of that so we are left with their sound laid bare, unprotected by the general sense of bonhomie which a hummable tune can bring. And all I hear, honestly, is a bunch of vapid, content-free songs whose only merit is a stylistic rip-off of an album released twenty years ago, but without a sliver of the substance.
And I feel slightly betrayed, I guess. I look back at their first record and think ‘were they this shit back then and I never realised it’? Were they this banal? Were they this utterly facile? And maybe it’s not that I think that they’ve betrayed me, but more that I have a vague suspicion that they’ve tricked me into making a bit of a fool of myself.
And whilst it is enough to say ‘well, you liked the first one, and you don’t like this one, that’s all there is to say, so just get over it and move on’, I find myself kind of fascinated by what it is which generates, not a sudden shift from liking to either disliking or indifference, but the actual venom of a real backlash, and I think that might possibly be it.
Vampire Weekend – White Sky I actually quite like this one.
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Vampire Weekend – Horchata But you all know what I think of this.
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thanks for that – sums up what I feel about it quite well, if not succinctly!
Erm, yeah, sorry about that. Succinct this is not!
Same thing happened with me and the Spin Doctors.
(This time with proof reading. Please feel free to delete the one aboive).
Sorry to be a pleb but, I had no idea there was any sort of backlash against the Broken Records!
There are and always have been totally fantastic.
Anyway, I would explain this rabid hatred simply because people love any art form because they identify with it. If something moves us it is because the artist is able to eloquently express a feeling often in way that is often better than we ourselves are capable of. Certainly they provide us with something that resonates within us. So when someone you felt a connection with, on any level, then expresses things you find dreadful, it feels like they have in some way betrayed you.
Sorry. Waffle waffle waffle.
I have deleted your comment, although it did deserve some sort of prize for the liberal and excellent use of typos.
Nicely (and much more economically) put. I think the backlash often comes about because we identify with something based often on very little information, particularly with bands – sometimes a single album, sometimes just a handful of demos – so it’s not just that they move away from you, I think the worst backlashes come from it dawning on people that they were there all the time, but you just didn’t realise it.
Oh, and I don’t think the Broken Records are actually ‘The’ Broken Records. Just Broken Records.
Interesting post, Matthew. Although this kind of explanation focuses soleley on the personal/internal side of things. There are obviously a bunch of social-external things going on as well, which influence how someone feels about certain music.
Do you often feel the same ‘betrayal’ experience with bands that were never very popular in the first place? I don’t think I do. And so conclude that it is probably at least a bit related to things like ‘just having too much hype around the first record’ etc etc.
Also probably we can like something in part because it is a bit new-sounding, and obviously a follow-up in the same vein can make you realise that you overrated something because of its novelty value. Actually ‘novelty value’ is a nice double-edged-entendre for that phenomenon probably. Saves me trying to get clearer about what I am talking about as well. Just saying ‘the streets’ + ‘novelty value’ is all I got now.
Obviously sometimes there are other stupid social factors at play in ‘the backlash’ as well, because quite often a second album gets slated at the time but in time ends up being regarded more fondly. Journalists don’t like to write the story ‘band you all thought would release a good album release a good album’ because it makes them look like the haven’t got anything interesting and bleeding-edge to say.
NB I am not suggesting that is what you are doing with this album, which you probably genuinely just don’t like. I am gonna stop typing now.
Also the typo in the request to remove the other post because of typos. Spectacular.
To be fair, bands have to expect this. That emotion resonance is what makes them worth spending your hard earned cash on. It is the flip side of the coin.
I’m still waiting for someone to release an album called ‘Difficult Second Album’.
Oh wait…
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/amnesiacs2
(before Big Fez offers to google that for me)
I thnk Billy Bragg subtitled Talking With the Taxman About Poetry ‘The Difficult Third Album’.
I bow to your superior knowledge.
I was trying to be funny. I should really know better.
Not on this site. To paraphrase the excellent Men in Black: “We at Song, by Toad do not have a sense of humour of which we are aware.”
Everything moves quicker as technology moves forward. I’ll bet Frank Sinatra referred to his fourth Album as ‘the difficult one’.
I know Beethoven’s sixth symphony is subtitle “Die schwierige Symphonie”
I couldn’t agree more, unfortunately. I had such high hopes for this record, and had rather hoped Horchata was just a forgettable one-off, a lone turd in the punch-bowl. I’ve only listened to it a couple of times but can’t think of many reasons to play it again.
Which “album released twenty years ago” are you referring to, Matthew? Not Graceland by any chance? That’s a bit older, mind you.
Vampire Weekend records’ only viable use are as frisbees. A bit like that bit in Shaun Of The Dead.
I know this as I have listened to half of one Vampire Weekend song.
Guess I’m alone in liking this record – but this review throws up some interesting things to think about.
the Broken Records backlash seemed unfair, especially seeing as it was such an amazing album. This happens to be in the spotlight because whatever people think of this album, it is the first ‘big release’ of the calendar year.I do hope the forthcoming Efterklang and Shearwater albums are going to get the recognition I think they should get (and now, not just because they are on 4AD/Matador!)
Oh, and Kate McGarrigle has died. This is a loss.news.
bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8468913.stm
aaah,
the perils and paranoia that come with being cool…
… and what happens when bands not so much lose their mojo as use up all the mojo they’re ever going to have….
Ed, I know what you said is sad, but including a link bbc.com/entertainment makes it seem like you really aren’t taking it that seriously.
Gordon – exactly. Mojo used up, cased closed, and I doubt we’ll ever hear from them properly again. Mind you, you could easily have said that about the Strokes and in my personal opinion their third album (after the dismal second) was brilliant.
‘cousins’ sounds like a mighty boosh chase scene, I also hate hype to the point that I’ve not even listened to Grizzly Bear for that sole reason.
Trust me, I am taking it seriously – in the last month alone we have lost Teddy Pendergrass, Rowland S. Howard, Jay Reatard, Vic Chesnutt and now Kate McGarrigle.
I hadn’t written my piece on 17 Seconds at the time, but I have now: http://17seconds.co.uk/blog/2010/01/19/kate-mcgarrigle-1946-2010/
Thinking of the Vampire Weekend backlash, I wonder what will happen to Fool’s Gold, http://www.myspace.com/foolsgold, again a largely caucasian band playing afrobeat…
Peej – I never stopped liking the Spin Doctors.
I quite like it, and last time I heard it was sailing to the top of the billboard charts, so I think they may well be around for a while yet. All the mainstream press reviews have been good, so where as I can understand the hate for it (and for their preppiness), I haven’t heard such a collection of interesting pop tunes since….the new Beach House record! It’s fun and you can jump to it, so what’s the harm.
They will ride out what is a fairly small backlash in the blog world because it doesn’t really matter. People will buy their album, come to their shows, buy the t-shirts and enjoy what they do for a decade or more now as they have the fanbase (and their albums are sold in Tesco’s), so whether folk think they are cool, or not what they thought they were, doesn’t matter a bit. It just reflects badly on the music “fan” playing one upmanship with his pals rather than how good the band is in the first place. The last thing any of this is really about is the music.
As you say, they’ve reached the point now where they’re famous just for being famous, so it doesn’t matter a jot about the music anymore. Once you’ve reached this level it is to a large degree self-sustaining, irrespective of the quality of the drivel you spit out once every eighteen months or so.
But for me personally I find it is very much about the music – as long as the tunes were in place it was entertaining, hummable, harmless fun which I can and do enjoy. Here’s my review of their last album, for those who doubt. But on this record I find the tunes to very much not be in place, which means that all the irritating aspects of the band suddenly come to the fore.
I’ve heard good things about Beach House’s new one from a couple of people actually – looking forward to them and Grizzly Bear at the QH.
Oh look… The cover has a polo shirt. How bizarre.
Fuck facebook.
but why spend time discussing / reviewing an album you don’t like?
‘specially given the heaving seas of decent records out there.
something i’ve often wondered about. backlash or not.
I think it’s crucially important for a reviewer to provide reviews of work they don’t like.
It gives regular readers and followers a more-rounded, balanced view of the reviewer’s tastes; which allows the audience, over time, to judge how much they will like an album based on the reviewers reaction. Even if it’s a case of “Well, Song By Toad hated it, which means I’ll probably quite like it..”
Controversial reviews also seem to generate more debate. Positive reviews often get little more response on the comments thread than a handful of replies saying “Yes, I agree, very nice”. They rarely get a full-blown argument going unless someone comes on and says, “Erm, no, Matthew, actually this is shit.”
Whereas negative reviews almost encourage the reading community to vent their own vitriol in the comments section, which in turn will lead to fans of the work in question vigorously defending their corner, while more level-headed members of the readership pop up to moderate.
So yeah, it really is rather important to chuck the odd stinker of a review into the mix, if you ask me.
Erm, this is shit. Well maybe not that bad. But it’s certainly not my cup of tea.
The Noughties were such an awful time for sophomore records. Seemed like a plague of the time. I’ll add I think it has something to do with the ages of the band members and what kind of touring experience they had after their first album. Many bands write their second album while on the road. During soundcheck and whatnot. Some procrastinate and force the writing/recording of the next album to meet an expected schedule. You know, there’s all kinds of stories (stone roses). Usually all ending in disappointment. which would make a good segment – second albums that outdid the first.
I’m easily impressed when a band has a solid single on their second album. shows confidence.
I suppose I should mention that i haven’t like vampweek either time around.
i *am* curious about the new MGMT.
and to defend my love for dunderhead pop – I’m releasing the first official U.S. Moneybrother album this year.