After recording two consecutive albums that I enjoyed (No simple feat), the New York City band Vampire Weekend have been teasing their third release for a while now. Three singles have been released off of the album (Diane Young, Step, Ya Hey). Now this is where things get a little messy for me. My feelings on the singles were mixed to say the least. I thought that Diane Young was cloyingly simple, and Ya Hey had a strange pitch shift effect in it that took me out of the song. Step, the best of the three, rips off the chord progression from a Bread song by paying homage to a early 90's hip hop song by Souls of Mischief that sampled a cover of it. (Actually homage is going a little easy on it if you ask me).
So needless to say I was worried about the overall quality of the album. I expected it to go down like their second album Contra. I hated Contra's first two singles (Giving Up the Gun and Cousins) but when I listened to the whole album every other song on it charmed me. That did not happen with this album. The plane has crashed, the car has flipped, and Vampire Weekend has shit the bed on this release. It is almost like Ezra Koenig and his band of merry-musical-trust-fund-children have intentionally tried to hurt me. In fact that is how I am going to take this entire experience!
You see Vampire Weekend was that one band I could list when people would say that I am just biased against modern "indie-pop". Vampire Weekend was different from the Grizzly Bears and Deerhunters of the world. They had passion and nostalgia and the ability to write a damn good pop song. Go ahead and listen to their first album and tell me that it isn't 11 songs of gloriously unabashed pop! I wonder what happened. Who was it that insulted Ezra? Perhaps they condescended to him as "a pop musician". Maybe it was on his cameo in Girls (Ugh...). Whatever happened, the band have taken to changing their sound. The kind of change where music critics will inevitably say that they are "growing up". "Aging" in the music world is apparently code for making less interesting or relevant music thn.
Vampire Weekend have stripped off a lot of those world beats that were part of what made their past two works so interesting in comparison to most pop songs on "alternative" radio. And as they dial back the african rythms and synthesizers they amp up the string sections. The sound on is record is much closer to the squeaky clean chamber rock/baroque pop of a band like Grizzly Bear or Bon Iver. The key difference in instrumentation would be the large amount of pitch shift used throughout the album. The pitch shifts are actually a perfect little metaphor for what this album really is: both an attempt at something new and a dumbed down version of their earlier work.
In regards to the first part, for about half the album we get Vampire Weekend trying for a slower side. This would be on of my major complaints of the album. The album's first track Obvious Bicycle accurately illuminates the problem of the album's slower songs. There is not a memorable moment in this entire song! It sounds like any band could have recorded it with Ezra singing it. This goes double for the song cycle in the middle of the album of Don't Lie, Hannah Hunt, and Everlasting Arms. I don't think it's even a song cycle, it just feels like one big 10 and a half minute song that lulled me to sleep like Justin Vernon wrapping me up in a blanket of symphonic pablum. The worst song, Hudson, is perhaps the most revealing about the album. It shows Vampire Weekend's biggest limitation so far. Their absolute ineptitude at writing the dark and brooding. Which is fine, some bands can only write certain songs. What is very far from fine is that this song made the album, or that it was even recorded. Surely someone had to hear this and realize it was terrible! Then the album ends with a minute and forty seconds of what I suspect is supposed to be an "ambient" statement of sorts. Or maybe they had some sort of quota of shit to fill and they cranked this out in 5 minutes on a smartphone.
As to the latter part of the earlier statement, every sound heard on this album sounds so produced, and just about anything interesting about the band's sound has been filed down to an album that sounds nice to everyone but interesting to no one who hasn't been heavily medicated. The only positive growth I see on this album is the mild experimentation on the one-two punch of Finger Back and Worship You, which just sounds like Animal Collective if you made them put on ties and pumped them full of mood stabilizers. Plus Finger Back (along with Ya Hey) has this horrible Lou Reed wannnabe spoken word section. So as it turns out the three singles which I found so underwhelming actually turned out to be some of the best stuff on the album.
Maybe I shouldn't get so upset about this band which is perhaps merely a hybrid of Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and "Diet Brian Eno". Maybe you would say I am being overly sensitive over a pop band making a simply mediocre album. You are probably right, this album isn't really a knife in my back, but go back and listen to California English or Oxford Comma and then think about it for awhile. This album fell short, which might not be the greatest crime but in the face of two pop masterpieces it feels like so much more... I guess in the end the greatest sin of Young Lion is that when it ends the next song that plays is Mansard Roof.
-SP McDonald
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