ARTICLE: “Vampire Weekend: Kaleidoscope of influences create a musical identity”
I was pleased to have the chance to speak with Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend for this feature, which comes in advance of the band’s Monday show in Holyoke at the new outdoor venue Mountain Park (which has already hosted The Flaming Lips, My Morning Jacket, and MGMT in this, its inaugural summer). The piece can be found in today’s Berkshire Eagle.
“Vampire Weekend’s lyrical focus almost defiantly obsesses over a very particular, narrowly scoped, upper class perspective: a world of Cape Cod weekends, women from Harvard, diplomat’s children and a nonchalantly effusive multiculturalism that reflects the self-consciously, self-congratulatorily liberal perspective presumably found in places like, well, Columbia University.
The lyrics are sometimes frustratingly oblique, but laced with a dizzying mishmash of cultural signifiers, at least some of which are prone to send any given listener straight to Wikipedia for elucidation. “Horchata,” a song about a beachside vacation, manages to have verbal fun by rhyming the titular word (a drink popular in Spain, Mexico and Latin America) with balaclava, arancianta and Masada.
The opening lines of “California English” are delivered by vocalist Ezra Koenig in an impossibly elastic cadence, so bouncily rhythmic and divorced from syllabic convention that it sounds like the sort of worldless chant you’d find in some forms of African music. (For a pop example, see the “Mama say, mama sa…” refrain in Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin.’”)”
Above photo by Søren Solkær Starbird
