Vampire Weekend is Ready to Rock your Argyle Socks Off

Don’t be fooled by the fact that you can only buy the catchy nerd pop of Vampire Weekend’s 10-track eponymous LP (also dubbed Blue CD-R, to commemorate its extremely limited pressing) at their live shows. The band isn’t being pretentious. It’s just that they’re unsigned. Don’t be bothered that the four men who comprise the band - Ezra Koenig, Rostam Batmanglij (seriously?), Christopher Tomson, and Chris Baio - all dress like your basic WASPy east coast geeks. They’re not being ironic. They’re just four nerdy Columbia University graduates (and maybe they’re being a little ironic. It is, after all, the New York hip scene).

They’re also the best new band going, if only record labels would wake up and pay attention. The band has independently put down a 3 song EP that you can download on iTunes. They’ve done their share of interviews, though they are still fairly inexperienced with the whole rock star process. They even just finished up their first North American tour - a tour that found them opening for such monsters of rock as the Shout Out Louds, Ra Ra Riot, and Tokyo Police Club.

And yet all anyone wants to talk about is how the record owes quite a bit to the influence of the bubbly guitar and afro-beat of Paul Simon’s Graceland. In interviews, this seems to have become a running gag among the band. They’ve even claimed to have planned it this way. Indeed, the influence is certainly palpable, though calling it a sheer impersonation oversimplifies VW’s record and misses the point. Vampire Weekend’s self-titled 10-track doesn’t sound like Paul Simon’s Graceland so much as it sounds like Paul Simon recording Graceland at the age of 19 in his basement with The Attractions as his backing band. In Cape Cod. With Pro Tools.

The funny thing about Vampire Weekend is the fact that knowing the band’s influences is totally unnecessary for pure enjoyment of the record. With so many self-reflexive hipster rip-off artists who take more pride in their influences than their music, Vampire Music seem to borrow a singing cadence from Elvis Costello here, a guitar sound from The Strokes (or Sonic Youth or Talking Heads or Velvet Underground, if you prefer) there. But what Vampire Weekend does next truly sets them apart. They take all their influences, and they put them back together in such a way as to actually attempt to create something new - or if not truly new, at the very least interesting and refreshing.

Tracks like “Mansard Roof” and “Oxford Comma” will get the most attention for best epitomizing Vampire Weekend’s sweatervest savvy. These are shorts songs slicked with just enough tongue-in-cheek geekery to earn a band a little buzz around Brooklyn. But while this band was born of the bookworm set at Columbia University’s literary society, the very best songs on the record are those where the band drops the inside joke altogether. “Walcott” plays like “Born to Run” in a pink Fred Perry polo shirt, providing both Cape Cod namedropping and “I hate my hometown” teen angst with a perfect smirk. The spry break-up pop gem “Campus” is preppy punk perfection. And the slowly building “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” provides a coda that vows the four young men who comprise Vampire Weekend are far from one-trick ponies. All they need now is a record label to call their bluff.