Vampire Weekend - Contra

Autotune is not so much a ‘trend’, more a guarantee for criticism nowadays. Regardless of how it’s implemented, and whether or not it fits into place with anything, loyal fans of a band like Vampire Weekend are bound to edge away in scepticism. But then they’re to some extent ignoring the song (‘California English’) itself; a bombastic, beautifully layered punk song made up of usually unconnected elements. It’s a stroke of genius, and a sign of the times - artists are finally beginning to use a new idea instead of just lumping it in to sound ‘a bit edgy’.

It’s like the first time the same tool was introduced to pop. After Cher released ‘Believe’, a short flurry of artists, from A1 to Britney, used it in excess, in line with a new millennium that was shortly arriving, a century of Y2K and robots taking our jobs inevitable. Present day, and pop producers are using it to shadow out an average voice; singers like Ke$ha and Will.i.am are already going forth with a pitch connection in hand.



One trend Vampire Weekend do however cuddle up with is minimalism. Short, clap-drums (a la last year’s side-project Discovery) define ‘Taxi Cab’ and a gentle sample of M.I.A’s ‘Hustle’ opens ‘Diplomat’s Son’. These are pop-punk songs in all their glory, but instead of producing a doppelgänger of a second album, Ezra Koenig and co have opted for new methods to operate the same machine.



Because ‘Contra’ is anything but a cheap trick, littered with gadgets and synths, a record that would go down as the antithesis of timeless. Much of the album in fact, could be used as a reference point of what the music world was embracing at the start of the decade; from tribal-spirit (already apparent in the band’s debut) to a more subtle means of writing catchy songs (see The xx and Yeasayer). But ‘Contra’ itself dates back in many ways to the 80s, references to The Clash (‘Diplomat’s Son’ might itself be about Joe Strummer: ‘You was the diplomat’s son, it was ‘81’) are abound, with ‘Contra’ confidently striding with a geo-political awareness, referencing ‘your first attack’ in ‘Taxi Cab’, a song that seems to be a homage to home-state New York. A verse in ‘Holiday’ talks of a girl becoming a vegetarian ‘…since the invasion’, someone who’d ‘never seen the word ‘bombs’ blown up’.



This is a momentous return, one that any subsequent decade will look at kindly. It’s yet another record that captures the sound of Brooklyn, but its ideas are wealthy and the band’s urge to try something new evident. ‘Something new’ might at first make you squirm, but that’s what Vampire Weekend are all about: making you love what

you never realised you could.