Vampire Weekend; Arctic Monkeys of 2008?

*BREAKING* New York, NY- Notorious indie upstarts Vampire Weekend put the sum total of New York's cool artists on a train to Auschwitz, says angry music fan Burt Stanton.

stop talking about this shit and talk more about how Vampire Weekend suck

why do people say they sound like the feelies when they mean they dress like the feelies

Hot Hot Heat coulda totally stole their thunder if they'd released a cover of "Day-O" last year

haha keep 'em coming

Ivy League indie rock with unfashionable influences T/S: Vampire Weekend vs. Bishop Allen?

burt santond etc it shouldnt really be so hard to trash this band - shape up!

i have heard better insults coming out of modesto!

all the good hating has moved to portland!

*BREAKING* New York, NY- Notorious indie upstarts Vampire Weekend put the sum total of New York's cool artists on a train to Auschwitz, says angry music fan Burt Stanton.

-- brightscreamer, Monday, January 28, 2008 1:56 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

lol

you think they'll ever achieve the heights of say, "Nothing But Flowers"?

new york is so uncool. im' totally moving to berlidelphia, maryland

my favorite is M79, even if it's a shameless "This Must Be the Place" rip

this band is boring but i haven't listened to them enough to really say anything other than that but to all haters distill your haterade to victory-ol and triumph!!

arcade fire were the first successfully blog hyped bland, no? and we have the arctic monkeys. who else?

nabisco's review v. cheekily invokes the sfj piece re: palpable basslines a bit of empty space. i lol'd.

I will bake fresh, delicious cookies for the first reviewer that mentions Lizzy Mercier Descloux instead of <i>Graceland</i>.

...and some day I will remember which boards use HTML and which use BBCode.

pitchfork are joining the party big time (8.8)

ah this promises to tun into one of the all-stars classic ILM threads

FFS, I even read an enthusiastic review of this album in yesterday's Financial Times week-end supplement.

worst party ever

xpost

Well, it's the most instantly appealing album I've heard in a very long time, so it's entirely possible that I might be sick of them in 6 months' time. Best make the most of them while I can, then.

They could be the Arctic Monkeys of 2008 in terms of "Butbutbut they happened WITHOUT MY PERMISSION!" outraged bluster - but that's a strictly localised phenomenon, right?

but srsly the afro-pop groove plays nicely w/sensitive white boy rocking - dont know why its still a novelty

the new single doesn't really do it for me

ive only heard the 10 song cdr

whereas Paul Simon's last 45 was SLAMMIN xp

[ban me] gave the first Bloc Party album an 8.9, so the praise for this album feels slightly muted

sorry, NABISCO. I didn't realize using the first name of the writer of an article on Pitchfork could get me banned, sorry!

Can I type the word Jess? Scott?

hmmm

well this is amusing

[nabisco] louis jagger

waht u can write louis jagger now? this is an outrage!

[nabisco] [ban me]

lol

what happened was someone fucking w/[nabisco] or something?

I wasn't the proto-Jagger: that thread get revived, and someone (Heave Ho?) kept pasting in my name, and at some point I think mods decided it was easier to just put on the Jagger-filter than keep coming back and snipping it out. At this point it would probably be safe to remove the filter and just go back and clean up the thread.

in my head i keep hearing "ban me" as "marry me" a la maebe funke.

every thread on ILX about a new "indie" band or movie should start with the wikipedia article on the narcissism of small differences

Well, here's one non-small tension you inevitably see between the criticism and the message-board talk: critics have some level of responsibility to talk about whether something's good at what it does, while message-board haters can lay in slams about what it doesn't. There was a line that wound up getting cut from the end of that Pitchfork review, saying that criticizing Vampire Weekend for not being dirtier or bloodier or more progressive is "like having someone cure Alzheimer's and complaining that she should have done cancer instead." One of the parts where this band wins is that they're very convincingly good at what they do do.

(P.S.: It is 100% true that Bloc Party's review should not have a higher rating than this.)

what they -do- do well is be boring, bland, and beige. so, they do succeed very well at that.

It's rare indeed that I find myself nodding in agreement with a Pfork review, but I thought you did an excellent job there, N.

do reviewers give the ratings at pfork?

did anyone catch them on the tour going on right now? they are comming by me next month....worth checking out?

Yes, although editors sometimes do get in their ear about that along the way. And obviously we'll often get an idea of what someone wants to say about a record before assigning it to them.

xpost

heard the whole thing now, for my sins, and i'll stand by the first 3 tracks; then well, i dunno if 'cape code etc etc' is meant to be winsomeley self-deprecating or whatever with the benneton and "unnatural, peter gabriel" refs but it sounds unbelievably smarmy whichever way, and the chamberpop thing after that is just vile and everything you suspected. after that the rest doesn't recover.

yeah i don't know why i'm on this thread either. can we get on with the tweeo walcott gags already or what?

Koenig is a detail guy
Koenig is a detail guy
Koenig is a detail guy
Koenig is a detail guy
Koenig is a detail guy

GOOD WORK NABISCO

(Ha, yes, to be clear: my saying the Bloc Party should be lower was a mea culpa, not an insinuation that it was anyone else's doing.)

(P.S. I love how suddenly in the last week this record has started bring amazing moral judgments out of people who don't enjoy it, accusations that these are bad people for making ... lyrically inoffensive peppy pop music. Which is something I was half-expecting, because the whole thing is that this band seems actively HAPPY, which will read to people they annoy as being smug and superior. This is kind of strange: if they came off less tidy and shiny and pleased with themselves -- if Koenig seemed miserable or something -- I imagine they'd get less of this reaction, which is kind of insane.)

xpost - I have no idea what what means but thank you?

The type of afro-pop that they're jacking has always seemed a little corny and rhythmically dull to me, so I've got no interest in a whitened up version + indie pop.

the whole thing is that this band seems actively HAPPY

which is offensive to pretty much the whole indie rokk value system of the last 10 years