Vampire Weekend are what they are, and are not ashamed of it. If you liked their first album, this doesn’t disappoint. Musically, VW still have a tendency towards a thin sound, even if they are admittedly catchy. Some stringed orchestration attempts to solve this (‘Taxi Cab’, ‘I Think Ur A Contra’), sometimes a brass section is the medicine (‘Run’), but generally the production tends towards twitchy electronic music.
‘California English’ has front-man Ezra Koenig doing his best Animal Collective impression (imagine Panda Bear on autotune) and ‘White Sky’ – an album highlight – is all about the blips and beeps. That is, until a catchy falsetto chorus to guarantee insanity come the inevitable incessant-summer-festival-repetition (think the effect of ‘A-Punk’, on helium.) ‘Cousins’ is an astute choice for lead single, tremolo riffing and machine-gun drumbeats adding energy which is sometimes lacking from Vampire Weekend’s setlists.
Lyrically, Koenig is still slightly lost in an Ivy-League world, yet he’s definitely more self-aware; when you name your album after Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries as a response to The Clash, you’d hope their pre-occupations would extend beyond minor grammatical errors and New York bus routes. ‘Holiday’ is close to being as thematically bland as the title suggest, yet lyrics like ‘She never seen an AK/In a yellowy Day Glo display’ suggest a sense of irony. The implication that Koenig has seen an AK, or anything close, might raise a wry smile. But they aren’t exactly Rage, and don’t pretend to be. Judging by a sold-out UK tour, that doesn’t matter, to them or their fans.
4 stars (7.7)
