If there's anything these upper crust New York kids have seemed to have learn comes from listening to African music, in today's bland overhyped popular music scene it's the difference between "Home Grown Talent" & "Corporate Marketing Hype" music: Vampire Weekend's debut album announces straight off that it's home grown. The first sound on the first song, "Mansard Roof", comes from Rostam Batmanglij's keyboard, set to a perky, almost piping tone-- the kind of sunny sound you'd hear in old west-African pop. Same goes for Ezra Koenig's guitar, which never takes up too much space; it's that clean, natural tone you'd get on a record from Senegal or South Africa. Chris Baio's bass pulses and slides and steps with light feet, & most of all there's Chris Tomson, who plays like a percussionist as often as he does a rock drummer, tapping out rhythms & counter-accents on a couple of drums in the back of the room.
And yet they play it all like indie kids on a college lawn, because they're not hung up on Africa per say -- a lot of these songs work more on a primal fun level, if you think back to when babies makes sounds to know they exist & or to self entertain. It all leaves behind nothing more than clean-cut pop & preppy new wave, tucked-in dress shirts, polo collars popped & English-lit courses long dropped but read on the side. Sounds good to me.
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John Halder is a 'good' and decent individual with family problems: a neurotic wife, two demanding children & a mother suffering from senile dementia. A literary professor, Halder explores his personal circumstances in a novel advocating compassionate euthanasia. When the book is unexpectedly enlisted by powerful political figures in support of government propaganda, Halder finds his career rising in an optimistic current of nationalism & prosperity. Seemingly inconsequential decisions lead to choices, which lead to more choices... with eventually devastating effect.
