Tuesday, January 29, 2008

All Your Diction Dripping with Disdain


Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

If you rock out in your minivan to Daughtry or whatever your local Clearchannel adult contemporary station makes you believe constitutes as rock these days, you probably have never heard of Vampire Weekend. The band is the latest internet buzz band that is declared by the holier than you music blogs as the next big thing. Of course, keep in mind none of the previous next big things actually became big.

Of course, much like Daughtry, it is hard pressed to call Vampire Weekend a rock band in the sense of U2 or The Clash, but are better classified under nerd rock after all the band met each other when they were attending Columbia (yeah they are smarter than you and don’t seem to mind letting you think that). They would have been a perfect fit for 120 Minutes or college radio in the late eighties put in-between They Might Be Giants and Violent Femmes.

Vampire Weekend’s self titled debut album sound as if They Might Be Giants tried to be a little more serious by listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland and early The Police on repeat for a whole year. Sure there is some quirkiness still in tack thanks to name dropping Lil’ Jon and Peter Gabriel while rhyming together Louis Vuitton, Reggaeton, Bennetton and really all you need to know about One is the subtitle is Black’s Got a New Face which you will be singing along with eventually if you listen to it enough.

But there is a musicianship on the album that was lacking in many college rock acts which is mostly what kept them on college radio and off the mainstream stations. The problem though is the album starts dragging near the end which isn’t good for an album just over a half an hour long. But, hey, it is much longer before Daughtry starts to get grating (which is only about five seconds).

Song to Download - Oxford Comma

Vampire Weekend gets a Terror Alert Level: Elevated [YELLOW] on my Terror Alert Scale.



4 comments:

  1. Off topic: I found Wonderfalls for $20 on amazon today, along with VM S3 also at $20. YES.

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  2. I say the VM price drop and actually all three season are under $21. I am going to have to alert everyone on my Valentines, birthday and St. Patricks Days list of this. Unfortuantly I just checked Wonderfalls and it is back up to $30.

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  3. It's actually "Blake's Got a New Face," not "Black." Great album :)

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  4. Things like that happens when you lack an editor and real words pass through spell check.

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