ivyTunes: What Is This Strange, Positive Emotion That Has Come Over Me?
It's the second installment of ivyTunes, our new music column. Our critic has the mic:
Okay. I admit it. I'm addicted to snark. Which isn't unusual for a twentysomething, male, Ivy League Lower Manhattanite desperate to hide his surburban breeding beneath layers of ironic pop-culture expertise and expensively distressed clothing. But your MP3s are seriously aggravating my condition. Like "The Guns," by Silencer (Yale '03). I, for one, wish this song sounded more silent.
But don't get me wrong. From time to time even I fall in love with a band -- truly, madly, deeply. And Columbia's Vampire Weekend (three '06ers, one '07) is one of those bands. Usually, Ivy League acts are bad because they're Ivy League. You know: competent but uninspired. No rough edges. Irrationally sure of themselves. And totally derivative. If you're smart enough, talented enough or connected enough to get into an Ivy, you probably don't need rock 'n' roll to save your life. At that point it's just another extracurricular.
But Vampire Weekend manages, against all odds, to make its Iviness a virtue. In rock, brainy usually means bad. Here, it's thrilling. "Oxford Comma" borrows its name from the superfluous punctuation mark, then rhymes it with "lama," "English drama" and "Dharamsala" (a town in northern India, according to Google). "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" harnesses the loose energy of 1980s Congolese dance music to do the girl-meets-boy thing -- complete with cameos from Louis Vuitton, reggaeton, Peter Gabriel and the United Colors of Benetton. And the preppiest VW number, "Walcott," reads like a map of coastal New England, namechecking Hyannisport, Mystic, Wellfleet and Provincetown. On all three tracks, the percussion is simple. The keyboards are simpler. And the melodies are hardly Mozart. But it's such sturdy, well-arranged and absurdly catchy stuff that I found myself hitting repeat for hours on end.
Alright, this is making me uncomfortable. Please return to sending in crap music. I know you have it in you.
RIGHT-CLICK TO DOWNLOAD:
Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma [MP3]
Vampire Weekend - Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa [MP3]
Vampire Weekend - Walcott [MP3]
More: Official site | MySpace
Debut album out later this month.
Want your band to be considered for ivyTunes? Email tracks to ivygate@gmail.com.
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December 8th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
i heard the songs for the first time on sunday and have had them in my head since. download that ish.
December 8th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
i love this band and could not be happier about this post. their two new songs are even better than those! you guys are so smart i wish you were living in my bedroom!
December 8th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
sucks
December 8th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Wow, these songs are really good . . . and I’m usually a music snob too!
December 8th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
terrible.
December 8th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
Great critiques, Adam & AB!
December 8th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
His voice is urgently douchey, and the lyrics makes me feel embarassed for people in general.
December 8th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Douché.
December 8th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
If you think this “sucks,” then stay tuned for next week’s “worst of the rest” post. You will be amazed.
December 8th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
Florida: I’m surprised at your voice comment. They’re one of the few pop/rock college bands I’ve heard that doesn’t have a signer with the generic pop-punk whine that drives me nuts.
December 8th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
why would you speak to me that way ?
December 9th, 2006 at 11:53 am
This is okay at points and sort of boring in its minimalism at other points. Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa evokes Paul Simon’s South African kicks at it’s best points. At it’s worst it sounds like the reason I think the killers should be dropped off in a mexican desert and left there to die. (NB: this is not as bad as the killers…just saying that the elements I don’t like are shared. But at least there aren’t any pencil line mustaches in this band…)
Basically, I find that this music is enjoyable when there are stacked harmonies and filled out. Otherwise, the majority of the time is filled with sparse (read: uninteresting) sections.
The vocals aren’t terrible, and at most points I enjoy them. It’s a little more passive and passionless than I like my singers, but they’re mixed well and carry good melodies.
Lyrics ARE a little embarassing in their ham-fistedness. So is Vampire weekend as a band name.
The whole thing, production wise, just sounds a little too Garageband instead of Protools to me. It’s not terrible, it just smacks of casualness,
which some people enjoy. It certainly doesn’t suck. Hurray for that.
December 9th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
i always get all worked up when people tell me how awesome some band is going to be. then when they’re totally uninspiring, it just makes me want to kill baby pandas.
…with a spoon.
December 9th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Eh. There’s a detached air to these songs that I think is supposed to reflect an ironic distance from the music but instead just makes it flat. I kept waiting for a breakdown or some kind of energetic refrain, but it never came. They don’t suck like the majority of other Ivy League bands but they also don’t go anywhere.
I do give them props for having The Dirty Projectors in their top 8, though. Speaking of which, you should profile him. He’s a former Yalie, I believe.
December 9th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
dave longstreth is a former yalie. as are the wowz (at least 2/3rds of them). the frontman of vampire weekend occasionally plays with the dirty projectors.
i find vampire weekend fun but that’s about it.
December 10th, 2006 at 10:09 am
I love to see braininess extolled, then “lama” and “Dharamsala” mentioned in the same sentence with “Google”… Because we’re so brainy we need a search engine to fail to tell us of Tenzin Gyatso’s flight from Tibet to India in 1950.
December 10th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
yeah, it’s nice that an “ivy education” lets people out without a basic knowledge of the modern history of a major world religion, like the dalai lama’s flight from tibet and the tibetan government-in-exile in dharemsala.
however, the man fled in 1959, not 1950
December 10th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Dear IvyGate,
Vampire Weekend and The Dirty Projectors play together because they are friends, and form a genius commune of sorts.
That said, every member of VW is very sexy and i thikn you should talk about that!!!!!!!!!!!!!
December 11th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Christopher: you’re right about their recorded vocals being quite restrained. I was surprised by this when I first heard the CD, since I’ve seen them several times live around campus and they usually *do* break out really energetically at several points in their performance. For some reason I guess they decided to keep that out of their recordings. Poor call I say, the lyrics fit really well with getting carried away for a bit.
December 25th, 2006 at 1:41 am
Vampire Wknd has a terrific new sound. There has been some negativity voiced on this thread which I think is a bit uncalled for. VW is crazy good and fun.
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December 26th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
If you could suck your own Ivy League dick you would wouldn’t you? God you are a shit writer.