With sterling third record, Vampire Weekend glad the focus is back on music
Posted May 14, 2013 03:13:39 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TORONTO – When Vampire Weekend debuted to breathless blog fussing five years ago, their pristine blue-sky pop was marred by a few pesky clouds.
The concern that was so crucial to any Vampire Weekend discussion at the time: was their unique, broadly accessible African-influenced pop somehow rendered unpalatable by the group’s preppy style, Ivy League educations and occasional penchant for preciousness? Even in churning out raves, mainstream media made near-constant references to the group’s supposedly passionate “haters,” while never failing to mention the group’s freshly scrubbed sartorial esthetic or upbringing — in reviews of the band’s self-titled debut, Rolling Stone, NME and Pitchfork all dutifully scribbled references to boat shoes, starched shirts and Columbia University.
As the band releases its third album, the sparkling “Modern Vampires of the City,” those conversations have finally faded into the background. And certainly, no one is more relieved than the band’s soft-spoken, serious-minded multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij.
“I think people have maybe a better understanding of who we are and I think that we’ve always tried to let our music sort of speak for itself and we’ve always wanted the conversations to be about our music as opposed to other things,” he said in a recent interview in Toronto. “So I think that naturally that’s happened. There’s been an evolution over time.
“I think all of us,” he added later, “would rather talk about songs, music and lyrics, as opposed to assumptions based on non-facts. Which was some of the story in the early days.”
And as the discussion shifted back to music, Vampire Weekend was ready with perhaps its most fully realized record yet.
“Modern Vampires of the City,” out this week, shows a band that has matured in the right ways, judiciously shedding or growing all the right elements. The globally derived gaiety of their earlier work has been scaled back, so their influences are no longer worn on sleeve, but stitched into the band’s fabric. The set hits dizzier heights of transcendent anthem-hood — check the chandelier-ornate “Step,” the giddy sugar rush of “Diane Young” or the swooning “Ya Hey” — while also finding lyricist Ezra Koenig pondering questions he’s grown-up enough to know he can’t answer.
As usual, Batmanglij’s Easter-egg arrangements yield considerable surprises and pleasures, but he says that — diverse instrumentation aside — the record started with his desire to put piano at the heart of a Vampire Weekend album. And after the far-flung experimenting on the band’s self-titled debut and 2010’s “Contra,” Vampire Weekend was focused on coming home.
“We were interested in figuring out: ‘What is our version of American music? What does that mean to us?'” he recalls.
The album sounds spontaneous. But it wasn’t — not really.
“This record was the first time that … the songs, they didn’t sort of fall out of the sky in a way that it seems like they had previously,” Batmanglij said.
So the songs weren’t coming easy, and the band wasn’t being easy on the songs. They had assembled enough original tunes fairly early on to fill a new album — “but it wouldn’t have been the album we wanted,” said Batmanglij.
So they kept pushing. As Batmanglij puts it, “We did not settle.” They held themselves to a such a high standard partially out of ambition, but also sheer pragmatism.
“On one level, sure (it’s ambition),” he said. “But on another level, you’re going to go out and perform these songs for crowds of people for 18 months and you don’t even like some of them? Or even you’re not quite sure about some of them? That seems like a bad place to be.”
He’s clear, however, that the chart-topping success of “Contra” didn’t ratchet up the pressure on the band in any meaningful way.
If anything, he says those sales benchmarks — certified gold in Canada and the U.S. — had a liberating effect.
“In some ways, I think it was freeing — ’cause we felt like now we’ve accomplished this milestone, and in that sense, it’s like you don’t have to worry about doing it ever again,” he said with a smile.
“We just feel pressure to make an album we can stand behind. We just want to feel like we expressed ourselves. I think on this record we expressed ourselves more in terms of music and lyrics than we ever have.”
“Modern Vampires of the City” has been referred to as the close of a trilogy, and for all its wizened growth, it’s still the work of a band that rarely sounds like anyone else working today.
And if all their elegantly framed works could hang in the same gallery, that pleases Batmanglij.
He recalls his parents taking him to see the 1996 biopic “Basquiat” as a pre-teen and becoming obsessed with the daring American artist’s habit of writing the letter E as three horizontal lines. Somehow, that influence stayed with him.
“Because whenever you see those letters, you know that it’s him,” he said. “That stuck with me … and I wanted from that moment for everything that I did to have an identifiable quality to it, a signature quality. And I hope in our music you hear that, that comes through, our identity comes through, ’cause that’s always been totally crucial to me.
“I feel like,” he added later, “slowly, inch by inch, we’re kind of creating and we’re evolving our own esthetic.”
