We’re only at the midway point, but already it’s been a remarkable year for music. Good luck to all those list-obsessed journalists who have the unenviable task of writing their “Top 10 Albums of 2013” articles come late December. How one would rank, say, the excellent debut albums of Disclosure, Rhye or Woodkid against equally impressive new albums from the likes of James Blake, Toro Y Moi, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or Charli XCX is beyond me… and that’s just scratching the surface of all the great releases that have come out this year.
Of course, because every conversation about pop music these days tends to begin and end with either ‘Random Access Memories’ or ‘Yeezus’, surely they’d have to be included in those year-end lists too. Daft Punk and Kanye West should truly be admired for having the right combination of star power and marketing savvy to turn their respective album releases into bona fide pop culture events. That’s simply not an easy thing to do in the digital age. Unfortunately Daft Punk’s meticulously paced content strategy and Kanye’s strangely compelling “no strategy” approach (cover art be damned!) were a bit too effective at building buzz, as neither album quite lived up to their enormous hype and each suffered from unfair public backlash because of it. The hype from these two albums also did the music community a huge disservice by overshadowing some of the other quality releases this summer, including the absolutely superb ‘Modern Vampires of the City’ by Vampire Weekend.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that it would be a stretch to claim that ‘Modern Vampires of the City’ was slept on. The album was a critic’s darling and debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, selling a respectful 134K copies in its first week back in May. Furthermore, Vampire Weekend already has millions of loyal fans and can command headliner status at the music festival circuit. In other words, they hardly need my endorsement. Yet I feel compelled to evangelize them anyways because they aren’t yet in the pop culture zeitgeist and seem relatively unheralded in the blogosphere too.
What’s notable about ‘Modern Vampires of the City’ is what it is not. Unlike ‘R.A.M.’ or ‘Yeezus’, it is not a concept album. It isn’t a cynical statement about the current state of the music industry. It isn’t a tribute to an idealized bygone era, nor is it a vision of a bleak future either. That isn’t to say that this album lacks concepts, vision, or astute social commentary (it’s got all three) but that it doesn’t demand that you embrace any prefabricated narrative or larger context in order to appreciate it for what it is. In fact, I wasn’t even much of a fan of the band prior to hearing ‘Vampires of the Modern City’ and was still blown away by what I heard.
Now let’s talk about what the album actually is. It’s youthful and exuberant, but also wistful and world-weary, often at the exact same time. Lead singer Ezra Koenig fills his songs with dense, poetic lyrics that somehow pack an emotional punch even while the listener is still processing their meanings. His lyrics manage to carry weight and grab attention no matter if he’s screaming over a guitar laden power pop song like “Finger Back” or quietly ruminating over a folk song like “Hannah Hunt” – the latter of which starts off softly but eventually crescendos into a layered soundscape of crunchy kick drums, distorted vocals, wailing guitars and amplified piano keys.
“Hannah Hunt” is just one of several songs that morph into completely new tempos and sonic textures and then back again before they conclude. For example, “Diane Young” starts off dense, full of electro bass lines, kinetic thundering drums, guitar riffs and electronic blips only to have the cacophony suddenly drop away, leaving moments of minimalist bliss consisting of only light snare drum hits and Koenig’s pitch-shifted yet still soothing chants of “baby baby baby”. Even in these moments of quiet the momentum of the songs on this album carry forward like the flat parts of a rollercoaster ride prior to its next big exhilarating plunge.
Earlier in their career, these sorts of abrupt pivots might have felt like a gimmick or overindulgence (as I thought was the case with their first single, 2008’s ‘A-Punk’), but here these movements feel fleshed out, organic and genuinely earned. Often times it’s Koenig’s singing which switches style most abruptly, from whispers to screams to scatting to spoken word pieces to fast flowing rap singing (think REM’s “It’s The End Of The World”). Koenig is clearly coming into his own as a singer and songwriter, and the rest of Vampire Weekend’s members are right there with him. It took a few years and a couple of albums, but finally they’re able to pull off the sort of high wire balancing acts and full throttle rollercoaster rides that they had only been hinting at previously. What they’ve crafted is a truly superb album, one that’s ideally listened to at the park or the beach, or while driving along the coast, windows down soaking up the rays of the early morning sun.
‘Modern Vampires of the City’ is truly the album of the summer, and likely my album of the year too.
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