via//chicago

np: "Cousins" - Vampire Weekend

Even if you hate Vampire Weekend, and there seems to be an awful lot of you out there these days, you have to give them credit for not backing down from the criticism and, in fact, just emphasizing it as much as they can. Too preppy and white-bred? Fine. The cover of their second album features a Polaroid of a girl in Ralph Lauren polo shirt. The first two lines of the entire record feature the words "horchata" and "balaclava". I kinda love it when bands engage in the game of emphasizing the very things critics hate the most. As for the music on the new record, Contra, itself - well, I think the boys have pulled off another great album, but we'll see how well it stands up 11 months from now. "Cousins" aside, there don't seem to be as many immediately engaging pop songs this time around (like "A-Punk", "Cape Cod Kwasaa Kwasaa", and "Campus" were on the debut), but I don't think it really suffers for this lack. The rhythms (yes, still heavily indebted to Africa via Paul Simon) are even more upfront and feature more than a hint of electronic influence ("Giving Up the Gun"). But as the beats grow more processed and rigid (Rostam Batmanglij's Discovery side project certainly rears its head more than once), the guitar lines and vocal melodies are as bright as ever and really breathe life into these compositions. All this results in an album that is at once more and less organic than its predecessor. Contra definitely reads like the record of a band developing nicely, without losing complete sight of what made Vampire Weekend such a phenomenon in the first place. I can't wait to hear what the "difficult third album" sounds like now that they've cleared the "sophomore slump" hurdle.