Tag: Music

Vampire Weekend: Contra

Matthew Eilar2 Comments

I spent a whole lot of time last weekend defending Vampire Weekend’s debut album to my friends, so I was really hoping that their new album would be something special. I just finished listening to their second album, Contra, with mixed-to-disappointed feelings.

I had heard that this album was California influenced, and I really liked their stylish mixture of African rock ideas and American punk pop. I was interested to hear new musical ideas incorporated into their sound. Instead, it sounds to me like they’ve retrenched that musical diversity into more Graceland imitation. I started laughing when “White Sky” began to play because it sounded like a Paul Simon outtake.

I think there are some real energy problems with this album. Part of the reason Vampire Weekend was such a good album is that all of the tracks had tremendous internal, propulsive energy that sounded –to me– punk-ish. That’s why the sound felt new. Contra dials down that energy a bunch. “Cousins” was released as the first single; likely because it’s one of the few songs with the energy of the last album (unfortunately it’s a weak song). This has consequences. It changes the style of the band. What sounded like reinterpretation of African polyrhythm now sounds like flaccid imitation. It also changes my perception of the lyrics: while they may be not significantly different than those on VW, they sound significantly more twee. On the first album, you felt that the precious lyrics were delivered as much with a snarl as a smile.

It’s not all bad. The only songs that make me want to skip them are “Horchata” and “Cousins.” “Taxi Cab” is a beautiful, downtempo, reflective song that would have been a standout if it was the only one of its kind on the album.

I’m not willing to go so far as to believe that Vampire Weekend was a happy accident, but I would like to see them branch out into different material, or explore more complexities if they’ve decided to stick with the same idiom.

To One in Paradise

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Here’s a recording of my college’s chamber choir singing “To One in Paradise” by James Bernhard, a setting of the poem by Poe. It’a a little rough, but it’s a deceptively difficult song. The music isn’t that hard, but all of the lines are so slow and exposed that intonation and support are issues.

From the Old Sad Bastard school of thought

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Here’s Glenn Branca saying that nothing new has been done in music for the last 50 years. Chris Milam thinks that Garden State has irrevocably damaged American culture.

Yawn. I won’t even bother, their commenters have done the work for me.

Alexander Street Press

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For those of you out there who have even a casual interest in classical music, I reccomend the free bi-weekly downloads from Alexander Street Press, an online subscription classical music database. The recordings are always one complete piece, and range from short chamber pieces for solo instrument to full symphonies. Their blog has RSS and there is an e-mailing list if you want to be updated when new recordings become available.

The National

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Another album that I listened to in my quest to listen to the critical picks of the ’00’s was The National’s Alligator. Boxer, the album that followed has become my go-to record for listening straight through. I won’t bore you with superlatives, but I will share something interesting that I’ve been mulling over.

It took a while for Boxer to permeate my musical conciousness. I had been a fan of “Fake Empires,” but most of the songs are so low key that all of the careful, subtle details went into the backdoor of my ears without every making themselves obvious. As I began to really hear more of it, I had a hard time figuring out what intangible thing made the production sound so fresh to me. Then it hit me; I was trying to project too much on the music. The reason that it sounded unique is that it is completely transparent, musically honest.

There are no production “tricks,” with the exception of some reverb and limited distortion on the guitars, everything is clean. While it’s not acoustic, there’s nothing that you couldn’t reproduce live. Matt Berninger sounds like he’s singing to you because his voice is not hidden behind layers of post-production. There is nowhere to hide

There is also nothing new in the structures of the songs; we’ve heard them a thousand times in other rock songs. They are so perfectly executed however, that this becomes an asset rather than a liability. This is one of the things that I like most about the album. Recording and musical technology is evolving so fast that it’s refreshing to hear a band that does everything with thoughtful orchestrations, solid songwriting, and supremely perfect execution.

A note on those orchestrations: music technology has lowered the price of recording and releasing music greatly, but has also made big, lush music with large numbers of session players obsolete and economically illogical. One of the great pleasures of the movie Ray were the scenes of big recording sessions (especially “Georgia On My Mind,” with full gospel choir and studio orchestra). I don’t have any information about the cost of this record, but I like that they went after that full, rich sound. Every time I listen to it I hear something new, some instrumental motif or riff that I never picked up on before.

If I had to pick something to single out for praise, I would have to choose Bryan Devendorf’s drumming and their recording engineer’s technique. Throughout the record, the drums sound beautiful. I’ve embedded “Mistaken for Strangers,” but the YouTube compression has killed it. Listen to it from a good quality file, or the CD. You can hear the rattles in the snare drum, the tom toms sound full, and the bass drum has not been overproduced to abstraction; in short, the drums sound like an instrument. It is also a credit to how tight the band is that Devendorf is free to drum interesting, syncopated patterns and not just be a metronome.

“Mistaken For Strangers” isn’t my favorite track on the album, but my heart jumps a little every time I hear the drums come in.