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.
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Vampire Weekend – Horchata But you all know what I think of this.
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