"I've always felt the most connected to pop music. What I like about the tradition is you can approach it from so many different angles."

So says Vampire Weekend’s singer and guitarist Ezra Koenig, speaking from the midst of a demented press schedule that includes some 40 odd interviews in a single day. The band are about to release their second album Contra, a record that, as Ed Power indicated in last issue’s review, is pretty much an assured expansion of the template unveiled on the their eponymous debut, which was a fusion of Afrobeat, Soweto and highlife rhythms hitched to sussed post-pop songs that, if they weren’t so unabashedly catchy and hummable and generally people-friendly, might be described as a geek’s orgasm.
Contra makes short work of that dreaded sophomore slump (and given that the group formed in New York’s Columbia University, the collegiate reference is apposite). But Ezra is under no illusions. Despite a respectable two-year turnaround, Contra didn’t exactly record itself.
“It was definitely a long process making it,” he says, “but the first record was kind of difficult to make too, in a certain way. I think we were pretty lucky in that the songs came quickly, and we didn’t have to sit around stressing out waiting for that, but in terms of the production and time spent in the studio, definitely it was intensive.”
They wear it lightly. Tracks like ‘Horchata’ are so buoyant they lead the listener to wonder if the sophistication and vibrancy of those Afro rhythms don’t automatically inspire a more upbeat, celebratory feel in the words and melodies.
“Sometimes the melody comes first, but it’s a two way street for sure,” Ezra states. “There’s always that kind of shared emotion in every aspect of the songs, rhythmically, lyrically, melodically. We’ve always been very interested in rhythm, even on the ballads. ‘Taxi Cab’, which is one of our quietest songs, the way that song started was Rostam (Batmanglij - keyboardist and guitarist) was working on a beat and came up with that original big dubby drum part, and even though it’s very slow and very quiet, it’s still a very powerful rhythm. Nothing needs to be defined as dance music, because (rhythm) is a part of all music.”
In other words, it’s about all forms of movement: walking, working, breathing.
“That’s totally true. And I think on this record we used a wider range of percussion, period. There’s plenty of drum machine sounds, hand percussion, guest percussionists, and one thing we realised is there’s no reason for every song to use the same tools. If a song calls for an 808 bass drum, there’s no reason why we couldn’t just give it a try.”
Heterogeneous elements yoked by force together. Songs like ‘California English’ may be underpinned by intricate pulses, but they also utilise elements more commonly heard in the conservatory: baroque strings, classical piano. And, in the case of ‘Cousins’, a rip-snorting blast of Dick Dale guitar.
“That’s something we were interested in on the first record too,” Ezra says. “It’s always more interesting to look for the connection between different genres and styles than to sit around talking about how different they are. It’s just about mixing things together that make sense.”
Still, the casual observer might wonder how a bunch of Manhattan campus rats developed an interest in township music. Maybe in an era of western music saturation, the curious are driven towards the margins.
“Well, even as a kid I remember listening to hip hop,” Ezra recalls, “which in itself is a mixture of different genres and ideas. The first genre that I became obsessed with as a kid was ska, Desmond Dekker and the Specials, and it was kind of clear to me that good music is always some sort of fusion, and that there’s no reason why things can’t be combined and reconstituted.
“I listened to the radio and was aware of popular rock music, but all the while I was also listening to plenty of other things. And I always found that the bands that I liked were the ones that made very open cross-cultural music. Even some of the biggest bands in the world like the Beatles and the Clash, you don’t have to go very far in their catalogues to find examples of music that wasn’t easily classifiable as just guitar rock.”
Indeed, The Clash come to mind at several points on the new album. The title bears obvious echoes of Sandinista, ‘Diplomat’s Son’ may or may not be an homage to Mr Strummer, and ‘Run’ has a whiff of ‘Straight To Hell’ in the guitar. As Ezra observes, The Clash were a four piece skinny white boy band, but their best work was informed by the Brixton polyglot, a garage/dub/soul/proto hip hop explosion that spread outwards through the West Midlands Two-Tone acts and the Northern soul revival and eventually the Bristol sound. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Afrika Bambaataa sampled Kraftwerk. Talking Heads boosted their nervy punk-funk with Carribean polyrhythms and African chant. Grandmaster Flash supported the Clash. Tom Tom Club mixed quirky pop with Basquiat colours and produced ‘Wordy Rappinghood’. And the Was brothers genetically engineered all manner of exotic creatures in their Ze factory.
“The stuff that you’re naming is music that was very important to me growing up,” Ezra says. “Especially because my parents had a lot of those records. When I first started listening to late 70s punk stuff, I immediately became most interested in records that were coming out in ‘79 and ‘80. The Clash and the Slits certainly couldn’t be pigeonholed as western guitar music, but it was also incredibly natural in the way that it came about. The Tom Tom Club and all those early rap singles... I dunno, I found it inspiring to think about how at that time period things weren’t as segregated.”
True, even the major guitar players in rock bands, like Johnny Marr and Edge, were namechecking King Sun Ade rather than the standard blues-based archetype.
“Both of those guys I love,” Ezra admits. “They made so much space in what they do, and rarely are those guys pounding out powerchords, it’s incredibly melodic, the way the guitar interacts with the bass is very similar to people like King Sunny Ade.”
And Vampire Weekend are one of the few bands who may be described as p**t-m*******t without recourse to the sick bucket. The collective began as an idea that was talked rather than jammed into existence, the product of dorm bull sessions and tape-swapping summits. Good heavens – a conceptualist group whose tunes (‘Holiday’ for one) you can hum in the shower.
“Yeah, I think we were always kind of clear that we wanted to have a specific aesthetic and a specific vibe,” Ezra confirms. “We’d been friends for years and we were already collaborating on different musical projects and writing songs together and talking about music, so for us to start a band it naturally had to be somewhat specific. After all that we’d worked on together, we weren’t going to sit down and say,’ Let’s start a band and just jam.’ Before we even had our first practice we’d already been working on a few songs, and pretty quickly the sound developed, and the aesthetic continued to devleop. I think that will always be our method of working: to start with an idea, no matter how vague, and then try to craft something around it.”
Well and good, but folk get queasy when they hear of musicians actually thinking about what they do – a hang-up that is present in no other art form.
“You’re right, everybody else spends so much time thinking about music, intellectualising music, but despite that a lot of people still want to pretend that the musicians they listen to are not intellectual, but that’s just a sham. Why shouldn’t the artist be thinking the same way about what they’re doing? I think people like the idea of the primal rock ‘n’ roll artist – but no matter where somebody’s from, they’re going to be thinking about it. But I don’t think think there’s any danger of us falling into that over-intellectual territory where it ceases to be music that has feeling.”
One might be well advised to consider the lot of the film scorer. Morricone, Mancini, Rota, Glass and Nyman all produced the most soulful and emotive masterpieces while working under the constraints of budgetary and commercial requirements and the strictest time coded cues. Ezra is no stranger to film: Vampire Weekend’s name derives from an amateur film project pursued in college.
“Definitely I find inspiration lyrically or in terms of vibe from film,” he admits. “Rostam actually worked doing some film scoring in the year between college and the band, and I think he brings a lot of that to arrangement and songwriting. We both have a shared love of film scores and I think even on the first album you can totally hear some of the influences. It’s a cliche but a lot of great art comes out of constraints, and I think pop music is literally just a series of constraints. For the most part there’s an expected length, an expected idea of melody, of rhythm. It’s got very broad parameters, but they’re still parameters.”