
(XL)
!!! A+ RECORDING !!!
He tapped ash on the floor. "This is a dump. This is unbelievable. But the kid don't know how to live even when she's got the dough." His speech had a jokey metallic rhythm, like a teletype. "So," he said, "what do you think: is she or ain't she?"
"Ain't she what?"
"A phony."
"I wouldn't have thought so."
"You're wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you're right. She isn't a phony because she's a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can't talk her out of it. I've tried with tears running down my cheeks."
~ Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote
"Pop" is such a condescending word, right? Unless you believe in it, in which case it suggests the most sublime and feverish things that can emit from our headphones. Pop wouldn't be pop without a bite of banality -- its essence of aim for the jugular requires an absence of literary construct. We can allow wit, we can allow the occasional poet to make his or her way onto the legislative floor, but immediacy is always everything. It's no wonder we have skepticism when guys who look just a little too comfortable with all this show up on stage. Oh, Vampire Weekend take themselves plenty seriously -- with a whole crop of indie rock bands that emerged in the last decade, they're real thoughtful bastards. They read the right books, went to the right schools, have the right pedigree, listened apparently to the right music growing up. They look they're enjoying themselves, which is a big plus in a world of neo-shoegaze, but that's never been the key to anything; people who hate all this frathole posturing have legitimate reasons for doing so. Appropriation? Maybe, but more likely that case of the cutes they've got -- their album covers carefully designed for maximum Futura eyesoring, the cheerfully asexual DMB-like broadness of their, uh, "vibe," and the prep in the room: the essence of their music is that it's about itself.
Nearly four decades after David Byrne barged onto stage in conservative garb and announced that he was violently opposed to compassion, love and oxygen, the conversation about whether he was joking or joking-but-serious or jokingly serious about not joking has yet to end even after three or four Ages of Irony, we've lost count. The old histrionics about the Clash's diplomatic son and the Rolling Stones' image-mongering futzing of their prep school background are a dimming light that explodes anew each time a new generation gets caught up in the permanently recycling rock & roll narrative. And after Talking Heads were accused of co-opting black music forms, after Graceland was accompanied by not just charges of appropriation but plagiarism and failing to credit collaborators and playing Sun City, after tUnE-yArDs' Merrill Garbus reenacted Mbuti chants into a preview version of ACID, we're still plenty uncomfortable with African music making headway into the mainstream strictly on the backs of four American white dudes (who aren't actually, but that's another matter). My own feeling is that Vampire Weekend rub people the wrong way in large part because they are sincerely coy about and aware of all these things, and that this blowback and backlash and instant adulation has made their third record what it is: an exciting, beautiful, affirming Great record -- the first Great record by a straight-on rock band of this decade, if you ask me.
Nobody's mind will be changed by Modern Vampires of the City, and let's not waste time grumbling that anyone's wrong about it per se, although it would every ounce of my energy to pretend I didn't fall in love with it within the first world-embracing seconds of "Obvious Bicycle," and thus my perspective is probably faulty. So let's take it back to the original point -- pop itself banal but in the best way, and maybe pop about pop banal in the worst... musical mythos, a berserk and heartfelt attachment to the very act of listening, is all Vampire Weekend are really here to tell us about, from the cologned hue and cry of "A-Punk" to the rock & roll aftermath of "Giving Up the Gun." To be sure, Vampire Weekend and Contra, neither nearly as yuppied up or Cape Codded as was often charged, danced on a wire between cleverness and passion, inspiration and affectation. But that was the point.
Not anymore -- not only is Modern Vampires of the City, the band's instantly immortal third album, their best and most ingratiating to date, it's their warmest and most genuine, which gives them a new kind of liberated free reign. Vampire Weekend don't have much in common with the Beatles musically or artistically, but the newfound directness in their songwriting, and the renewed pleasure rather than obsessive-compulsive busyness in their committed precision is the same kind of leap forward that A Hard Day's Night was after With the Beatles. They're not "loose" or spontaneous and they never will be -- every note of music here feels obsessed over and arrived at -- but they've learned to wring immense catharsis out of their music. It's always clear and restrained but never, ever stiff.
The wit we talked about earlier is in the music and performance, not the lyrics. Not that there's anything wrong with Koenig's pop culture-doctorate wordplay, but it only seldom comes to mean much to me in and of itself: in the disarmed storytelling of "Giving Up the Gun" and "Diplomat's Son," sure, or in "maybe she's gone and I can't resurrect her / truth is, she doesn't need me to protect her." But generally, what I come back for is a spark that's enhanced but not defined by Koenig's verbiage. His delivery is a different matter, but we'll come to that. By musical wit, I really mean that the songs are so consistently surprising and filled with detail and tossed-off beauty that becomes clearer and more resonant with time. The most intricate of the new songs, "Step," moseys around on top of delicately pretty keyboard and harpsichord but hits hard with sly lyrical asides and skewed-up vocals; it's midtempo but fills its sporadic beats with such bounce that it feels like dance music.
But then there are "Diane Young" and "Finger Back," pop songs so overstuffed with pleasure they come on like web-age Alex Chilton, only radio-smarter. (Ariel Rechtshaid's sparkling production helps.) Like most bands that learn to take immense pleasure in the possibilities of studio-based craft, there are any number of performance impossibilities on these songs. Koenig's vocals extend, speed up and overlap; the drums are overdubbed and echoed until they become oceanic, and the songs in general are delightfully hooky and strange constructions that have everything to do with harnessing a moment. I have no doubt Vampire Weekend can do great things live, but no band can work all this magic on stage. That's one but not the only mark of how they've changed since 2010. The other is audible in the sweetness of "Unbelievers," as comely and universal a straightforward rock song as I think can exist in 2013, and "Everlasting Arms," a ballad that brings the most regret allowed yet from the band's sunny playbook -- which only increases its sting. But even the slow ones like "Arms" and "Hannah Hunt" take left turns, boast unexpected instrumentation, and never cease with the rhythmically calculated shots of enthusiasm and grace. For a record that so constantly changes pace and style, it's incredibly consistent and unified.
Because Vampire Weekend have mostly (and deliberately) left behind the aural texture of their first two records, in favor of among much else a newfound Middle Eastern influence probably owed to both the band's new confidence and to the artistic renewal from Rostam Batmanglij's work outide the band, the commonality now is Koenig's tireless (if often uncannily similar to Paul Simon) voice. He's settled into himself enough now that even his tics and cries and wobbly spoken-word asides are revelatory, evocative of both Buddy Holly's nervous energy (a great fit with the burst of joy on "Diane Young" and the classicist '50s doo wop form on "Don't Lie") and Bobby Fuller's almost godly grandness. The latter is clearest on two expansive cuts that provide the album's climax: "Worship You" and particularly "Ya Hey" bite off a huge spiritual-emotional chunk quite fearlessly and prove the band to be intimidatingly expert at such rich pop fulfillment that towers, entices, bites like hallmark alt-rock predecessors from "Bastards of Young" to "Dreams" to "Bleeding Heart Show."
And they know it too, which will piss some folks off -- they'll read it as arrogance. But when greatness is a given, as it has been at various times for the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Neil Young, and now Kanye West, a comfort in the audience-listener relationship can overtake. As "Ya Hey" wrings out with a hook that should be Wings-level annoying but just feels like a shower of bliss, as "Worship You" enters that last chaotic chorus, and as "Obvious Bicycle" says fuck off to all preconceptions and both opens and reveals itself as slowly as it can get away with in 4:11, it's as if an admired friend is speaking to you again, giving you the latest warts-and-all message even if the goals have changed with the years. That's a classic rock & roll conceit that was dissolved in the MTV period and forgotten by the Internet age: shrouded in mystery, an artist comes out and says their piece and retreats again, and we're grateful for what they contribute. Art-punk phony hipsters, I don't give a fuck, man -- I wish more music made me feel like this does but it doesn't. I'm not even sure the rock idiom has room for a whole lot of music that makes me feel like this.
What makes this a probable classic, though? I don't think Vampire Weekend or Contra are masterpieces, but I'm pretty sure this is -- and I've struggled over the last few weeks to determine whether this impulse was deeply felt or just overexcited. It might be exciting and beautiful, but it nabs at something more soulful than such platitudes indicate. Let's look at the post-millennial records I'd call Great: Stankonia, The College Dropout, Donuts, Have One on Me, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and whokill are all individualistic and restless, devilishly inventive but emotionally felt albums with virtually no weak cuts between them, and each with an overwhelming enough number of highlights that naming my favorite cut is a constantly evolving struggle. All of those records challenge the time-tested idea of "the album" itself and served at various times to completely infiltrate all aspects of my life. When I'd wake up in the morning, tUnE-yArDs or OutKast would be playing in my head, teasing with the unexpected changes and eccentricities within and without the songs; and when I revisit those records, that starts to happen again. But one other thing those six LPs have in common is that they're not "rock" albums per se. Limit us to straight records by rock bands and my picks become more sporadic yet. Exclude Yo La Tengo and there's only three: In Rainbows, The Coast Is Never Clear, Wincing the Night Away. It's hard to elicit real imagination from guitar music these days. But those each became my world, and so has Modern Vampires of the City -- its march and saunter and slink through city streets lifts me right up... and then knocks me back down with that eerie closing run of "Hudson" and "Young Lion."
Let's liken the descent into bleakness on this finale to "A Day in the Life" or "The Overload," hailing both from albums that various critics have likened to this one. That should tell you what stakes we're dealing with here. And since the Beatles were playing a part on Sgt. Pepper and David Byrne was playing a part for four straight albums and Kanye West is upholding a persona and preconceptions attached on Yeezus, I can't say that I'm all that interested in whether anything about this is authentic or not. All I care about is it's brilliant and divine, and I'll feel it in my bones probably as long as I'm breathing. I bet it's more likely that you'll feel the same than it is that you won't, but if not, that's part of the experience really, and this is one band that makes that feel like an inherently joyous process.