Brookyn’s
Vampire Weekend are currently the hottest indie-pop name to drop, having
just released their afro-beat laced album on an unsuspecting world.
Danielle Goldstein chatted to the band to see what all the fuss is about...
Cup
a hand round one ear and you’ll hear faint whispers in the air
preaching of the latest New York fad and Brooklyn’s new underground
scene, but when you go in search of it you may be at a loss. The fuss
over raw-indie bands such as The Strokes and The Walkmen has long since
died out, and with label giants merging and reigning a vast majority
of the music kingdom, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for
new talent to break out. But when a new sound does break out and it
prophesises to be expertly educated in the ways of ‘Cape Cod Kwassa
Kwassa’ and ‘Upper West Side Soweto’, it comes as
a rather pleasant revelation.
Under genres
so strange, it’s unsurprising that this fresh New York genius
goes by the enigmatic name of Vampire Weekend, named after a lo-fi horror
flick attempt by front-man Ezra Koenig. The band formed at Columbia
University, in the Upper West side of New York, they shared a love of
Africa and music and hey presto! Eighteen months later they were signed
to XL and were ready to release their self titled, debut album.
In the
months following their emergence the UK press was quick to lump them
into the Brooklyn scene with bands such as Yeasayer and Celebration,
but do they see themselves as part of it? Keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij
doesn’t seem to think so. “I don’t know, is there
a Brooklyn scene and do we feel a part of it? I would say no.”
So why
does the press feel a need to place bands into pigeonholes, whether
they fit or not? “A lot of the connections are probably tenuous.
I think mostly that sort of scene-making comes from the journalists
who have an easier time writing about the bands they’re into if
they can sell their editor on some hook or story.” This is perhaps
why Vampire Weekend chooses to place themselves into various genres
of their own, ‘Campus’ and ‘Oxford Comma Ridim’
being among the suggestions on their Myspace.
“I
think that came from all of us feeling that bios were so cheesy no matter
what. We felt like it would be weird to have one of those bios in the
third person. So, we thought the best way for us to say a little something
about ourselves would be to make up these fake genres. In the genres
there’s juxtaposition in the various phrases that we’ve
chosen and juxtaposition is something we’re totally after as a
band.”
Their afro-beat
laced, pop wig-out of an album can be compared to early Talking Heads
and Paul Simon, from the skitty rhythms through to Ezra’s vocals.
But mixed among that are violins and raw jangly guitars. Somehow Vampire
Weekend have managed to pulp together the best bits of music-past in
a fantastically, mind-boggling way.
“If
we had a song with hand drums and guitars with a certain kind of slap
back delay, then West African guitar music was an influence. Then we’d
want to find something that you wouldn’t find in West African
guitar music like a harpsichord. So, in ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’
you can hear the influence of West African guitar music but then in
the end a harpsichord comes in and it’s something that you wouldn’t
expect that was influenced by Bach. I guess it was our idea to bring
together things that were separate. I think the point of our band is
to never let anybody say, ‘This band does this and they do it
well’. It’s more exciting to be the band that takes weird
things and mashes them together.”
Rostam
describes their sound as taking pop music from hundreds of years ago
and today, from different parts of the world and putting it all together,
which is exactly what they are - an amalgamation of pop that refuses
to sit still, ever evolving. Born in the eighties, they all formed a
fondness for early punk from the late seventies, before it got distorted,
when it was ‘clean.’ And then their interest in African
literature blossomed and they started thinking about the correlation
of objects as well as sounds.
“Ezra approached colonialism in terms of aesthetics. He became
interested in the word khaki and how it’s a word we frequently
hear these days as relating to a certain kind of style of pants and
where the term khaki pants comes from. He realised that it came from
India and from the colonial era and then he became more interested in
stuff like that. I think all of us are interested in why Ralph Lauren
has paisley prints. What’s the significance to Ralph Lauren? It’s
a deeper interest.”
Between lectures Rostam spent a lot of his time playing around on the
production side of music, working on it in different ways and learning
as he went and towards the end of their degree the boys began recording
everywhere and anywhere that would let them. “Nowadays with technology
it’s really easy to do, you can just put the session on a hard
drive and carry it wherever you want to go. We had about 10 songs exactly
a year ago in some kind of shape and then we toured throughout the summer
and this fall we went back and recorded two new songs. We took one of
the original songs off and that was 11 songs. That was it. I feel a
lot of people make records like this. They don’t go into the studio
anymore and rack their brains.”
And of
course Rostam produced it all. It’s the first full album he’s
worked on, but he’s dipped his toe in the sea of soundtracks too.
“After I graduated I wrote music for films. They were just graduate
school, 20 minute films. The movie I worked on that was longer was called
The Ten [comedy starring Jessica Alba and Adam Brody, among others].
It’s made by David Wain. I think it’s more of a cult thing
in America.”
Vampire
Weekend aren’t the sort of band to sit around twiddling their
thumbs when there are new projects they can get their teeth stuck into.
They’re already raring to start piecing together the next album,
they’ve even written some new material for it that they’ve
been bandying about in the odd live show, it’s just finding the
time to get into the studio, which is something Rostam wants to do ‘more
than touring’.
“I
love the idea of working with different producers. There are a lot of
exciting things that you can do in producing a band because if you think
about the divide between electronic music and dance or rap - which is
made not as a band but as people with computers - those kind of walls
have crumbled and it’s one thing now. All the same rules apply,
whether you’re making dance music or rock music.”
Having
already toured with bands as big as The Shins and Animal Collective,
Vampire Weekend have been welcomed with open arms into the music-community.
“We opened for The Shins in Paris at La Cigale. We felt like people
hadn’t really heard our music but somehow we’d won them
over. It was completely packed when we played and it seemed like everyone
was there to hear the music.”
But why
have this fresh young band, which seem to have come out of nowhere,
been so anticipated? “I think it helped that we started recording
as soon as we were a band. I think what being hyped about actually means
is people having your songs. I think that’s all hype is to a certain
extent.” Or perhaps it’s because they’re responsible
for pairing the most baffling lyrics with mystifying noises and creating
one of the most intelligent sounds to come out of last year. No one
could possibly explain it but themselves. “I think that if you
try to say exactly what something means, then what’s the point
of singing it? It exists in that subliminal world where it’s just
vibes being put out. If you were to try to deconstruct those lines in
particular it wouldn’t be worth doing.” But what is worth
doing, is waiting the few months of U.S touring for these preppie New
Yorkers to come back to England so that you can witness their all-inclusive-generations
of pop madness ‘vibing’ against a Jamaican steelpan choir.
Leave your sensibilities at door.
