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CD review: Vampire Weekend ‘Contra’
‘Contra’
(XL)
Grade: B
The bolt-from-the-blue brilliance of Vampire Weekend’s first album rested largely on how successfully it fused everything stereotypical upper-class white people like — with four dapper Ivy League-educated gentlemen crooning about images of Cape Cod summers and infatuations with Louis Vuitton-adorned girls — with the habit-forming beats of African popular music. That mixture gave the band the catchiest and most resonant multicultural white guy pop this side of Paul Simon’s “Graceland.”
That formula sticks around for sophomore album “Contra,” but with added textures and layers of depth, from the M.I.A. samples on “Diplomat’s Son” — at six minutes, “War and Peace” by Vampire Weekend standards — to the billowy auto-tune of “California English” to the blaring trumpets on “Run.” Lead singer Ezra Koenig takes on added vulnerability on “Taxi Cab” and album closer and pseudo title track “I Think Ur A Contra,” which sounds more dreamlike and ethereal than even the debut’s slowest moments. The result is an album that, at 36 minutes, is concise but not immediate, the definition of a grower that takes time to reveal its mysteries. It lacks the slam-bang fun of their self-titled debut — lead single “Cousins,” with its frenetic punk rock energy and surf guitar rolls, is the closest thing to last album’s instantly affecting “A-Punk” — but expands Vampire Weekend’s toolbox. If the debut album was the perfect party record, “Contra,” with its increasingly epic scope and references piled on top of references — the ever-clever Koenig’s even titled the album in direct contrast to the Clash’s “Sandinista!” — is better suited for a long road trip, to be immediately queued up and played again after its first listen.
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