#32 - Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

XL, 2013

Considering that Vampire Weekend’s sophomore LP Contra was well received, it’s wrong to call Modern Vampires of the City a redemption story. However, considering how much I disliked Contra, that’s what it felt like to me. Vampire Weekend emerged from a pile of polo shirts in the northeast when I was in my PEAK MUSIC CONNOISSEUR phase circa 2007. I remember soaking up the early CD-R rip and not know what to make of it. Since then Vampire Weekend has been one of those bands I forget about until I put one of their albums on and realize how good they are. Why I didn’t like Contra when it came out is still a mystery (though I still haven’t listened to it since then), and why I loved Modern Vampires of the City is also a mystery. It’s just one of those albums where I look at the tracklist and go, “Yep, yep, oh that one is great, oh that one is outstanding…” I think a lot of that comes from how controlled this record sounds. That kind of “everything just so” quality can make for a fussy record that isn’t a lot of fun to listen to, but there are so many interesting quirks in the synth programming and the brilliant melodies that this one always ends up feeling timeless every time I run through it. We’ll see how it stands up a decade from now, it could very well sound the way 80s music sounds today, but you never know. Also I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out this album’s sequencing, which does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to making this one such a treat to listen to. There’s such a diverse array of sounds on this album that you didn’t get from their Graceland indebted debut. It’s an album that feels like a band actively pivoting into a fuller and more mature sound, and that is exhilarating to me.