Album Review: "Modern Vampires Of The City" - Vampire Weekend

"Modern Vampires Of The City": B-.  Every once in awhile I like to get a small sample of the music that the Gen X and Y'ers are listening to these days.  The success of my sporadic experiments has been no better than hit and miss.  I often come away from a listening session wondering if, twenty-five years from now, there will be oldies stations dedicated to playing the sounds of the 2010's.  It stands to reason that the answer is "yes," especially if one considers the growth and popularity of satellite radio where there's a station for every taste, but I can't imagine today's music ever knocking the music of the '60's or '70's (or the '50's) off the air and into the dust bins, rarely to be played again.  I probably won't be around to find out if my prediction is true, unless I'm listening from that big juke joint in the sky.

There was a lot of buzz a couple of weeks ago surrounding Modern Vampires Of The City, the third album by Vampire Weekend, a four man band comprised of recent graduates of Columbia University.  The album debuted at # 1 on the Billboard charts (as did their second LP, Contra, three years ago), and garnered mostly positive responses from the critics.  One of the age-old questions about song writing is "which comes first, the lyrics or the melody?"  I have not seen that question asked or answered in media interviews of the band members, but I would be flabbergasted if, on this offering, the lyrics were not in place first.  Modern Vampires Of The City is replete with cross references to esoteric writings by philosophers and essayists, religion (notably Judaism and Islam), foreign cultures, and songs from the band's two earlier albums.  I am not criticizing that methodology.  The Beatles did the same thing, such as giving a nod to I Am The Walrus in Glass Onion and She Loves You in All You Need Is Love.  But the writing approach results in a record that demands careful listening and, if you're an eager beaver, a generous portion of due diligence research.  I will leave some of that for the younger crowd, clearly Vampire Weekend's fan base anyway, but I do enjoy lyrics that make you think.

The song getting the most attention is the fourth track, Diane Young.  Is this about a woman with that name, or a play on words "dying young"?  The smart money is on the latter interpretation, as anyone who's ever heard of the Ted Kennedy cover-up surrounding Chappaquiddick Island would spot the connection.

Irish and proud, baby, naturally

But you got the luck of a Kennedy

So grab the wheel and keep holding it tight

Til you're tottering off into that good night.

Perhaps it's purely coincidental, but some of the album was recorded at nearby Martha's Vineyard.

My favorite is Hannah Hunt, a story of the slow dissolution of a romantic relationship.  Once again, there is room for more than one interpretation, as the protagonist could be singing about a cross country road trip he took with his mate, or the trip could be a metaphor.  The singer looks at himself and his girl as a unit, but the longer he's with her the more he realizes that she considers herself singularly.

In Santa Barbara, Hannah cried amidst those freezing beaches 

I walked into town to buy some kindling for the fire

Hannah tore the New York Times up into pieces.

The most accessible song of the album's twelve tracks is Everlasting Arms, a song in which lead singer Ezra Koenig not only sounds, remarkably, like Paul Simon but which comes close to copying the bouncy base beats of Simon's You Can Call Me Al and Late In The Evening.  Like many other songs on MV, this one arguably has religious implications and can be deciphered to death.  My take is that the singer bemoans the fact that he cannot, in good conscience, accept the reality of a higher being, notwithstanding the rest of the world's willingness to do so.

Could I've been made to serve a master?

Well I'm never going to understand, never understand.

Another theme which crops up in MV is depression, or at least fatalism.  On Obvious Bicycle the advice is to "spare your face the razor because no one's gonna spare the time for you."  Why bother to freshen up your appearance?  It will not matter in this dog-eat-dog world.  On Unbelievers he sings:

The world is a cold, cold place to be.

Want a little warmth

But who's going to save

A little warmth for me?

Obvious Bicycle and Unbelievers are the first two tracks on the album.  Nothing like setting the mood right off the bat!  But even before you push "play," you can't help but notice the art on the CD cover.  It is a haunting photograph taken in 1966 by Neal Boenzi, showing an aerial view of New York City on the smoggiest day in that metropolis' history.  One hundred sixty-nine people died from the effects of the pollution.