Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 28/01/08
Label: XL

In these times of rampant txt spk and carefully cultivated street patois, when even lecturers at Britain's more illustrious tertiary education institutions admit to tearing their hair out in despair at the inadequate grammatical, syntactical, spelling and punctuation skills of those under their tutelage, it's oddly cheering to find a band - American, no less - who have penned a tribute to the humble comma. "The Oxford Comma", to be specific, which - you might like to know - is the final comma before the "and" or the "or" in a list.

Quite why Columbia University-educated hipsters Vampire Weekend were thus moved remains a mystery, but since their opening line is "who gives a f*ck about an Oxford comma?", it's fair to say that they're as attitudinal and irreverent as they are grammatically savvy. Supporting Brian Eno's theory of "scenius", which he describes as "the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene" are Ezra Koenig (singer/guitarist) and his three pals who, like compatriots Yeasayer and Dirty Projectors - and, to a lesser extent, TV On The Radio before them - have added explicitly African flavours to their alterno pop.

Vampire Weekend have actually described their mixing of off-centre, Shins-like tuneage with high-life, kwassa kwassa and juju as "upper West-Side-Soweto" and readily acknowledge the formative importance to them of a compilation of music from Madagascar. All of which might suggest "Vampire Weekend" is a hideous, world music pastiche cranked out by a bunch of smart-arsed preppy dudes whose right-on parents have too many Paul Simon albums to their name. Not a bit of it.

It's rather a genuinely exuberant, joyously infectious and sheerly celebratory affair, its tribal drums, parping keyboards and rippling, brassy guitars offset by sweet vocal harmonies and reverb-laden solos, with Koenig's witty and literate lyrics marking out their crucial difference. Importantly, Vampire Weekend are well aware of the possible pitfalls of their plundering, as the line "this feels so unnatural, Peter Gabriel too" (in the lovely, dappled light-strafed "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa") proves.

Yes, Gabriel rears his head at times, but so too do David Byrne circa "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts", The Police ("Zenyatta Mondatta"), Orange Juice - whose love of African high-life has been overlooked by subsequent generations following their nervy, white-funk trail - and even The Strokes (just bend an ear to "Campus"). The (Afro)beat, it seems, goes on. That Vampire Weekend appear as loving caretakers, rather than colonisers - or even castrators - of the sound shows the scale of their talent.

    by Sharon O'Connell