Vampire Weekend Modern Vampires of the City. A few weeks ago we watched the Vampire Weekend at the Red Rocks. Most of the crowd seemed there to be wooed rather by Of Monsters and Men than by Vampire Weekend. It was delicately brisk. Of Monsters and Men played as the early evening sun spilt and while the crowd imbibed and tended to their chronic conditions with their prescriptions and then performed their stilted high altitude sway to morose sorts dressed as frumpy matrons we sat and considered love and the view and the sky that sat so near above us. It turned to darker night and Vampire Weekend arrived, we're old, thank goodness, and we cheered the clock's lethargy. I don't remember which song they played first, or third, or ninth, but it was lovely. Their small, tinny songs expanded nicely against the flatirons and infused the crowd with a bombastic sense of collective indifference. We stared out across the plains below, we spied our tiny little home, we counted the stars and danced to A-Punk and Unbelievers which is playing at the moment. Coincidentally I just heard this song on World Class Rock just yesterday, it sounded tinny and almost too tiny for ears on the radio. Are they a radio band then? Perhaps they are best measured and possibly appreciated through earbuds plugged into laptops. The words mixing in with the letters on the display. When my fingers tap in time with my square-ness stuck to office chairs in the middle of summer I can picture the synthesized crescendo intersperesed among excerpts from condensed versions of John Updike or Upton Sinclair or Helen Gurley Brown. My uncle by marriage has just written a book. He wrote it and then strangely he has allowed others to read it. Do people do such things? I wonder. In the early days of blogging, long ago, I've been at this almost 12 years I would regularly change the name of my blog if I believed I was achieving any level of notoriety on the interwebs. I am not so concerned these days. I receive quite a few hits actually, mostly for My Autumn Empire incoherency but also for the gems hidden in the back catalog. Unbelievers has ended. And now the first single Step. The words don't mean anything at all. He spouts them in public, he acts terrifically proud when speaking of them in interviews. They are a hygienic band. I appreciate that. Fact: Modest Mouse were the worst band of the 2000s. It's true, not even Johnny Marr could disagree. The words are something approaching an avant garde landscape. The visual sense is overly stimulated so that a view from the inside of minds on Step is distressingly oblique, common and static filled. We watched The Bling Ring and I expected Vampire Weekend because Sophia Coppola is down with the kids but we missed Vampire Weekend and marveled at how brilliantly she captured the vacuous narcissism of the age, the nihilistic pursuit of celebrity, a fusing with the collective consciousness of the facebook nation. It was disturbingly empty. Diane Young now, this is Vampire Weekend circa 2007. These are the staples, the Ford Crown Victoria of the model line. When we were shivering in the wake at Red Rocks we oticed Ezra Koenig playing at playing Elvis Presley and it's obvious here in between the squelches and the momentum that the king of rock'n'roll has reached down from the clouds and blessed his side part. They are still a young band but they are not as young as they once were. Profundity, take notes. But it was just a few years ago when they were snot-nosed punks, fresh faced, exciting. And now? Do they listen to the Beach Boys and The Smiths? Do bands today have that archivist sense that so many brilliant bands in the past had or are they caught up in the present, in their Flo-Rida's and their Robin Thickes. Are they part of this rush to celebrity? Vampire Weekend on Girls this week! The headline buried in the surf. If ever a show had a short shelf life it is Girls. It's brilliant, certainly, but it is so wrapped up in the superficial that I can't imagine it resonating beyond the sell by date of the gouda or hummus. But in our newly trendy neighborhood we might soon hear the strains of Don't Lie wafting over the rows of Catalpas in bloom. When we were out walking the other evening we spotted what might be classified as a hipster: species unshaven, unclean, uninteresting, unromantic walking along the road while we gasped from across the way. A true hipster neighborhood would banish us for considering Vampire Weekend at all. Better to love their Beiber ironically and their faux John Mayer guitar solos played on their grandmother's expensive guitars at hipster christenings for hipster babies born into a world of diffidence and chemical amendments. I only have one hipster friend. She was not into Vampire Weekend when I last met her. I attempted to convince her of their brilliance but I was not the first one in, her friends, the hipsters, had contaminated her and she has a mind of her own and she may have thought they were dreadful. It is a legitimate opinion in some circles. We live in a square. It is part of our own avant garde landscape. Hannah Hunt starring a kinetic gardener populating thoughts along Interstate 10. They should have taken the train, gardening can be thought on luxuriantly while riding the rails, while embracing the peak of fine living circa 1953. Rail is one of the most regulated industries in the world, thus it is frozen in time, the speakers would spill Ann Murray if they hadn't stopped working before Snowbird entranced the world. A Canadian songbird is a repeating fugue of American life. Will Ann sing a charity track for the tragedy in Quebec. For the airplane crash in San Francisco, or the Islamists in Tahrir Square? Unknown. Vampire Weekend are incoherent to be political but they dutifully avoid taking a stand. But could they possibly surprise anyone with an expression of where they stand? Everlasting Arms speaks of stands, not the bleachers, not the stands that hold umbrellas in place, not the stands of leaf spot blighted Aspens, but their position on the unimportant issues of the day that take precedence in the collective heart that rules our lives these days. A society ruled by emotion and the fear of judgement. We will judge you and you and you and Vampire Weekend. We judge them splendid. If apolitical. The sky blushes. The strings digitized and pasteurized, the childlike voice. I appreciate that he is willing to make his voice ugly in pursuit of the esoteric. The chicken dance song has begun just now. Finger Back. It's for the jazzercise class for mothers who are pregnant by donors anonymous or unknowing, wear your ballet slippers, slide across the epay floors in sophisticated studios on impoverished avenues of dense urban collectives. We need to take a yodeling class. Is that imperialistic. Worship You now, they do yodel, then it's rather lovely, it smacks a bit anthemic, soaring voice, the drummer enthusiastic and the organ pitched climactic. It's an ear worm, as a professional reviewer might say while painting vividly with words. I despise people who would deign to explain to you why this song is not nearly as good as the third track on the new Ruby Pins album with professional credentials to back up their wrongheadedness. Actually, I am desperate to hear the Ruby Pins record. Grass Widow! They're lovely, sure, I should write about them some day soon, but they are pedestrian and pretty and Ruby P promises something a bit more austere and threatening. Youth and its fleeting grasp taunts Ezra Koenig. Vampire Weekend will never be able to be affixed with the label "threatening". My mother would love them. We called my parents en route to Red Rocks to the show. We should have conferenced them in with the band. They could have hopped on a train and been here in time for the Gezi album. My father could do sit-ups and push-ups on the train and beat my face up with his six pack of stomach muscles and I'd feel embarrassed for his having a six pack in his seventies. Were I to pick a surreptitious six pack smuggler in Vampire Weekend I would select the drummer as top candidate. Drummers are meant to be fit. Their mother's must be so proud of their time in the shuttle run. Maybe a drummer on steroids would join Danzig and then compete in the strongest man competition. Playful whee-ing in the the chorus run-out, wordless and fertile. Now a piano tinkle and a spoken word moment of seriousness. This record is fantastically charming. Ya Hey is only semi-wordless. In the night air it lingers with anticipation. Now to Hudson, the spooky side of Vampire Weekend. IDM programming, some selective opining on the European crisis??? Or the Hudson's river seduction of Northern New Jersey and the ruins of lives washing out to sea, the Greeks entombed by dreams of Deutsche marks and the words are rather interesting here. Is he not so incoherent then? Are his poems deeply furrowed pathways into the memory of western civilization afloat on a sea of arithmetic and philosophy? Nicomachus and Gauss, Hypatia and Godel, Sappho and Nina, the world and its shadow, life and anti-life, his name is alive. This album speaks to the man inside the boy, the night inside the dawn, and we take note of time's progress and turn to dreaming for hope eternal as the final moments fade to black.