MOG

Sometimes you need a record that’s rough around all the right edges. Sometimes you need an album with harpsichord solos. Thankfully, both can be found in Vampire Weekend’s eponymous debut.

Leaping out of the blogosphere and into your local Target, Vampire Weekend formed at Columbia University in early 2006, released a much-discussed EP in 2007, and now this proper full-length in January. Chris Tomson, Ezra Koenig, Rostam Batmanglij and Chris Baio have already been tentatively declared by mainstream press (SPIN magazine’s March cover) as the best band of 2008.

But is the buzz justified? As the Arctic Monkeys (and countless others which you may have already forgotten) proved a couple years back, all you need to become wildly popular these days is a Myspace page with a few choice tracks. Vampire Weekend have both and they—like the Arctic Monkeys—infuse exuberant, tastefully sloppy musicianship with a hip and dazzling array of influences.

The best example of this cosmopolitan buffet might be “M79”, which kicks off with cello and harpsichord, sounding like incidental music in a BBC documentary on the Industrial Revolution. At the 34-second mark, drum and bass arrive and the track shape-shifts into Paul Simon circa Graceland: Afro-pop with bouncy bass, reggae rhythms and Koenig’s voice (which can sound a great deal like Simon) backed by echoed harmonies. A violin straight out of Vivaldi’s “Spring” ornaments the verses.

On first listen, it’s perhaps far too tempting (though lazy) to simply dismiss Vampire Weekend as a bunch of preppy dilettantes pillaging Paul Simon and the classical influences they were probably exposed to as Ivy Leaguers. Yet Vampire Weekend’s assimilation of Afro-pop on the album—as with Simon’s Graceland—feels less like thievery and more like reverential tribute…which is to say it’s presented no more cheekily than the harpsichord solos are.

Besides, it’s difficult to remain fixated on the record’s overt classical and world beat influences when every new track throws the listener another musical curveball. Whether it’s the peppy Celtic-channeling stomp of “Bryn” or “Campus”, which opens with an insistent house beat and throws in some NYC post-punk guitars from The Strokes’ side of town, Vampire Weekend leave no doubt to the size of their bag of tricks. Elsewhere, “A-Punk”, couples a ska-punk groove with lush organ, while the cello breakdowns on “Walcott” single-handedly invent the term “chamber punk”.

Unfortunately, as if handcrafted for the Ritalin-clutching generation, this record aims at being everything for everyone. Prizing excitability and a “kitchen sink” approach over actually saying something substantial proves to be the band’s greatest challenge. And the band’s mad science of genre-mixing results in a couple of awkward moments, like the mostly flat “(One) Blake’s Got A New Face” and shambling opener “Mansard Roof”.

Overall though, Vampire Weekend’s solidly constructed songs help their musical molotov cocktails go down smoothly, and therein lies this record’s success. As Sufjan Stevens could tell you, ambitiously arranging pop music with classical instrumentation is no mean feat. Vampire Weekend prove themselves up to the task and worthy of the buzz.