Fangs For The Music

Apr 03 2008 5:03 pm,

Profile: Vampire Weekend

Words: Martin Kahl

End of year deadlines mean this is being written about three weeks before Christmas, and the taste-makers’ crystal-ball-gazing-fest is well under way. Which names will be big in 2008? Who’ll pick the next Arctic Monkeys? And who’s going to be remembered for backing the next Fischerspooner/Black Velvets? One of the names popping up time and again is Vampire Weekend. But who the devil are they? And why have they got a page in our New For ’08 feature?

At an early Vampire Weekend London gig, this writer overheard someone saying, “…what sort of music is this?” A good question, and one we put to lead singer Ezra. “It’s really hard for me to describe our music too. The last thing we want to say is that we’re a rock band. We want to incorporate not just African music, but sounds you don’t normally hear. We make catchy pop songs mixed with the sunnier side of African music like Orchestra Baobab, or South African guitar music.” If you’re struggling with that, think Franz Ferdinand meets Peter Gabriel meets ‘ Graceland’-era Paul Simon and you’ll be some way there.

Vampire Weekend’s debut album comes barely two years after Ezra Koenig first asked Rostam Batmanglij, Christopher Tomson and Chris Baio to join his band; he’d just abandoned work on a short film called Vampire Weekend, and the film’s title seemed like a good enough band name. “We started the band in February 2006 at Columbia College in New York City, where we played campus parties,” explains Ezra. “Then we moved to Brooklyn and started playing more traditional downtown venues, working our way up to bigger slots in Manhattan. We also started getting in touch with record labels. So many bands get signed on the strength of a Pitchfork review and two Myspace songs, and then never come up with anything as good again. We’d already recorded a whole album ourselves.” He’s referring to ‘The Blue CDR’, an album of demos sold at early Vampire Weekend shows. Now signed to XL, ‘The Blue CDR’ is a thing of the past (and a rare collector’s item), and an album proper is due in February. So is ‘The Blue CDR’ the blueprint for that album? “There’s some new material, and some tracks from ‘The Blue CDR’ that we’ve reworked. We’re perfectionists, and we didn’t feel like those demos made a complete, finished album. But it was basically the heart of what we do”.

What makes Vampire Weekend worthy of a full OTW page? Easy. Their genre-defying “pop music” is as catchy as they’d intended, whilst sounding refreshingly different from anything else around at the moment. Their debut album, now complete and ready to go, is a strong, confident finished work. Vampire Weekend is definitely a name you’ll be seeing a lot of in 2008.

‘Vampire Weekend’ is released on XL Recordings on February 25^th.

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