Vampire Weekend; Arctic Monkeys of 2008?

anyway they remind me a little of a cool fresno band called rademacher, who aren't yet polished enough to be anywhere near as famous as VW, and may not want to be.

lol, they make the News Hour

the new vampire hands record blows this shit out of the water if yr looking for vampire rock

lol microgenres

r&b trend poll

6/10

4/4

naw, you ain't heard the new Jahiem song in 6/10 time? Shit is crazy.

every time i see these dudes name i think of werewolf bar mitzvah

the new vampire hands record blows this shit out of the water if yr looking for vampire rock

There's also a band in Chicago called Probably Vampires.

^^ I'm not sure I'd entirely consider them vampire-rock, though, they might be something else

I mean, Chicago vampire-rock has been all downhill since Lake of Dracula

Is this thread still going? Has everyone not come to terms with the fact that this is a nice, catchy indie-pop record by nice clean guys and GOT OVER IT?

Don't forget Vampire Can't, the rad noize band!

ha playing kimmel right now with a hs marching band

totally rad

the bassist is the biggest fucking doofus of all time

vampire bar mitzvah
spooky scary
boys becoming men
men becoming vampires

i met them yesterday, job in Los Angeles, really nice guys.

and i like the album, even surprising myself as i thought it would get old fast, and told them so.

Terrible article:
http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/story/0,,2276328,00.html

...

OK, this is odder than I thought. I read that article this morning and was amazed at how bad it was. Then this evening I read an article on graphic novels in a recent LRB and was amazed at how bad it was. It seemed odd to be coming across such pretentious, twaddling, lengthy crap in two places on the same day. To compound it, the next LRB carries a sycophantic letter from Steve Burt with a correction to this, he says, GREAT piece on comics.

Then, getting that link above, I realized it's THE SAME WRITER. My goodness - this irritating chick is going to haunt us for years with her 'I was a depressed graduate student' BS.

Haha, Pinefox, if you look way upthread you'll actually find her posting here!

the new vampire hands record blows this shit out of the water if yr looking for vampire rock

Having just seen these dudes the other day = I concur.

nowai u guys vampire wolf is best

I wonder how many people here remember the time (2001) when The Strokes were seen as really important, and Tom Ewing launched a SPECIAL ISSUE of FREAKY TRIGGER with various people writing about them. The only one I remember now is Nabisco's very long article which argued, as far as I could tell, that the Strokes weren't a big Rock deal but a fun Pop group. I pretty much agreed, though felt this was fairly obvious. This thread feels similar to that.

I have hardly heard this band, but what I have heard I didn't really like. I can't believe Nabisco prefers their LP to Tigermilk. That says something surprising about where he, vs many of us in my country, is coming from. It would just be unthinkable for most pop fans I know to say such a thing. (This is circular, as most pop fans I know know each other because of Tigermilk.)

Nabisco uses words like 'eight-note' and 'the clear channels'. Am I the only one who doesn't really know what they mean? Nobody else has said that they don't.

I think that should say 'eighth-note'

and '2001' should have had a ? after it.

Listening to a few tracks here
http://www.myspace.com/vampireweekend
it doesn't sound great. Not very strong or likeable vocals, and not much to get hold of in lyrics or melody. WTF is this silly 'Peter Gabriel' chorus about? It sounds rubbish, embarrassing. The band's one strength might be the lead guitar parts: which are chirpily OK, but not much more.

pinefox is obviously right that this band are mediocre.

I have hardly heard this band, but what I have heard I didn't really like. I can't believe Nabisco prefers their LP to Tigermilk. That says something surprising about where he, vs many of us in my country, is coming from. It would just be unthinkable for most pop fans I know to say such a thing. (This is circular, as most pop fans I know know each other because of Tigermilk.)

this i don't understand -- most pop fans have never heard of 'tigermilk', the lucky blighters.

I can't believe Nabisco prefers their LP to Tigermilk. That says something surprising about where he, vs many of us in my country, is coming from.

hey, I didn't say it

Nabisco uses words like 'eight-note' and 'the clear channels'. Am I the only one who doesn't really know what they mean? Nobody else has said that they don't.

if you're unfamiliar with 'eighth-note', it's because you're unfamiliar with basic music theory. if you're unfamiliar with 'the clear channels', you're missing a reference that most people familiar with the american music business would catch.

I'm curious to know what these terms mean now.

Good.

I am unfamiliar with most things, including music theory and the American music business.

Pinefox I submit to you that if your first exposure to Tigermilk had been checking out B&S's Myspace and listening skeptically to a couple of samples, it wouldn't have left much of an impression with you either

My first exposure to that record didn't make much impression - it was on a tape, taped from another tape, taped from some distant vinyl copy or whatever. For a long time I listened to it over and over, notably while washing up (a way I have listened to much music) and it did frustratingly little for me. I felt B&S were overrated on the whole (not least because some of my favourite people adored them so).

Then one day I took a long bus ride, and listened to TM on my walkman, and it was transformed for me; and to an extent, perhaps, my whole view of B&S was radically improved.

No reason why anyone else should be interested in that story; just a response to your submission.

I guess that you (as I said above, in a way, re Nabisco) are coming at the B&S vs VW comparison (made by Nabisco, I think) from a very very different place from most pop fans I know. Most of them would find it unbelievable that anyone could rate VW over B&S (B&S at their early, fragile best, indeed). This is not an idiosyncratic stance on my part, it's a very consensual one, and a consensus in which I am content to remain.

I think I may have misquoted Nabisco earlier, and the other technical term he used was 'the clean channels'.

actually, it's probably an equipment reference, not a biz one

many ppl disdain a fragile sound. VW are far from exclusively 'pop', if distinctions are insisted upon. aside, are you familiar with Don Lennon?

I did hear him once or twice online. I will listen to him more, on that site, if you think I should.

no, that is not necessary

I thought that Elif Batuman article on Vampire Weekend was fascinating.

I thought it was pretty good except for when she got on the wrong train or decided to be a film critic

I think it was clear that her take on Wes Anderson was meant to be not the view of a professional film critic, but more of an idiosyncratic personal response, in keeping with the overall theme of the piece.

Never thought envy was part of the Pinefox's hidden arsenal.

I'm not gonna forgive her for being rong because she isn't a professional. It also wasn't that idiosyncratic. Or that rong. It was frustrating because in its misreading (to me) of WA - he makes live-action cartoons, not realistic evocations - it suggested a misunderstanding (to me) of the 'vibe' concept, which is pretty concerned with tactile reality.

Oh stop sending me to sleep with yr dreary not-one-of-us protectionism, we've killed the professionals, deal with it.

waht

I think her criticism of Wes Anderson is not that he's unrealistic or cartoonish, but that (esp. in his later work) the exotic background doesn't connect with the foreground characters in any meaningful way.

I can't contribute much to the Vampire Weekend vs. Belle and Sebastian conversation, since the only Belle and Sebastian I've tried to listen to was some of their later work, which sounded a bit too twee and labored to my taste - the sort of thing carried off more effortlessly by Camera Obscura on their most recent album. And it's possible that the cultural "vibes" (to use Batuman's term) evoked by the somewhat fragmented and kaleidoscopic Vampire Weekend lyrics may not translate as well across the Atlantic.

I think her criticism of Wes Anderson is not that he's unrealistic or cartoonish,

right, I said that she fails to understand that he is those things

I don't see how the notion that Anderson is cartoonish undercuts the critique that the exotic settings in his films are ultimately found to be arbitrary and sterile. In other words, embracing his shortcomings as an aesthetic choice doesn't change the fact that they are shortcomings. Whereas pop song seems better suited to the task of organically interweaving the exotic flourishes with emotion and visceral pulse, as Vampire Weekend do in their better moments.

Wes Anderson has a pulse?

No, sorry if that was poorly worded. I meant that pop song (and specifically Vampire Weekend) does.

I think the problem is now we're in a time where people take pop and pop culture way too friggin seriously; a million essays are out on Vampire Weekend, a band that gets more critical attention than if a lost Pasolini film emerged.

"But, taking pop seriously is like ... so progressive! If you're against it, you're just some bloody rockist." (language borrowed from 2004, but the attitude still operates fully).

The Pinefox surely knows what eighth notes and clean channels are, though maybe not what I'm using them to refer to here:

people are listening to this for well-made happy eighth-note indie

It's a rock standard, but in particular it's a basic, deep-rooted component of indie rock, since the punk days, to have bass & guitars clicking along playing eighth notes. (Often the guitar plays power chords, or muted power chords, and the bass plays the root note of the chord.) And of course you vary from that point -- you omit some or double some into sixteenths to create a rhythm -- but it's still the ultimate basic. The bulk of punk songs do this, new-wave is all about it, New Order guitar work usually revolves around it, Pixies bass lines revolve around it, the Strokes' "Hard to Explain" does it ... you know what I'm talking about, right? This is a simple, base-level, building-block component of what a certain type of music sounds like, and so when bands do it, it seems to appeal to familiar, comfortable, fundamental pleasure centers in people who happen to enjoy that kind of music -- the same way basic old-school boom-bap beats do for hip-hop.

Vampire Weekend don't actually play that eighth-note grid all that often, and when they do, the drummer usually works around it, but the moments where they ram it home (like "Campus") have that simple/basic/"clean" quality. It also seems to undergird their writing even when they're not strictly doing it.

they'd be neither the first nor the last people in the world to hear a couple African pop compilations and think "those are such pleasant guitar sounds, let's use the clean channels from now on."

Guitar amplifiers often have two channels to choose between: the "clean" channel just amplifies your guitar, and usually sounds smooth and chiming, while the other channel adds gain or overdrive, and makes your guitar sound fuzzy and distorted, as in most(?) rock music. Vampire Weekend exclusively use REALLY clean guitar sounds; there aren't even pedal-effect sounds to notice; and it's incredibly hard to imagine them using a distorted/effected sound in any way whatsoever. One would assume they've picked this up from African pop, a lot of varieties of which are also built around very clean-toned guitar work. Especially because that clean, complex guitar work is one of the main features of lots of west-African pop that's immediately appealing and recognizable to western rock listeners: it's something a young guitar player will hear and be liable to think "wow, that's a great sound, and I'd love to be able to play like that." (Cf loads of English indie guitar players in the 1980s, like Johnny Marr.)