In commemoration of their third LP, “Modern Vampires of the City,” we’ve put together a list of the best songs from their storied five-year career. So: Boil up some Darjeeling, iron your collar and get ready to tell us how wrong we are as we count down to number one.
10. Mansard Roof
Let’s start with the song that kicked off Vampire Weekend’s first, self-titled LP. The song throws cello, Afro-pop electric organ and architectural lyrics at you in the first 10 seconds. In other words, it’s a perfect introduction to the band circa 2008, not to mention one of that album’s better songs.
9. Diplomat’s Son
Here, the ostensible story of the lyrics—a coy narrator falling in love with the son of a diplomat circa ’81—are charming, but more so as an accessory to the tropical, M.I.A.-sampling backing track. On “Diplomat’s Son,” the groove, keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij, is the focal point—and it’s a beaut.
8. Oxford Comma
“Mansard Roof” might have been the band’s idea of an introduction to their music, but odds are, you heard “Oxford Comma” first. Like “Mansard Roof,” that Afro-pop organ is in full effect, lightening the blow of drummer Chris Tomson almost hip-hop snare-and-rim beat. Referencing Lil Jon and the United Nations in one go, this song served as a sort of microcosm of the world of Vampire Weekend back when they first hit the airwaves. It’s one of those love/hate songs wherein you know what side you fall by the first chorus.
7. Everlasting Arms
It’s a rare song that comes off as beautiful, somber and groovy, but that’s just what you get with “Everlasting Arms.” It’s one of the band’s most shiver-inducing tracks, thanks to its sweet, simple chorus and almost tangible bass, one you’d wait for and hope they’d bust out at a live show.
6. The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance
Regardless of its defeatist nature, the chorus “The kids don’t stand a chance” has a kind of cathartic feel when screamed out in a crowd of concert goers. Vampire Weekend has a habit of ending their albums on a somber note and this track, with its blubbering surf guitar and slow, funked bass, fits the bill as the most down-tempo of that LP. As it’s final track, “The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance” reveals some of the band’s fatalist leanings they explore in full in their subsequent albums.
5. Taxi Cab
Like “Diplomat’s Son,” “Taxi Cab” explores the love affairs of the insanely privileged, as our narrator pours over a just-past lover as he/she is moved from “compound to compound,” pretending to be off-put by the uniformed guards that await him. It’s an interesting angle, even if the band takes it twice from two different angles in “Contra,” and is oddly relatable in feeling despite how alien the circumstances may be. It’s also remarkably evocative of New York City, a love of which the band has made no bones about. In a word? Transportive.
4. Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
This is the one song that earned Vampire Weekend the “Upper West Side Soweto” label. The rhythms and sounds—conga drums, an Afro-pop guitar—and the lyrics on rich teen love in America add almost directly up to that branding. It’s an equation that’s romantic for half and exploitative to the other (or so the media story goes). But the song comes out as something more than the sum of its parts. It was a breathe of fresh air into a pop music culture that by in large rejects anything that’s not a given until it proves it might be. “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” didn’t reinvent the wheel or anything, but it did introduce a kind of different type wheel to a group of kids who knew nothing about it—and got them to like it.
3. Step
As we stated in our review of “Modern Vampires,” “Step” is both an acknowledgement of the band’s idiosyncrasies and bound forward into its future. All the hallmarks of the band circa “Vampire Weekend” are in there: geographic name-checks, a classical bourgeois harpsichord and a reference to higher education. But it’s not so simple: “Wisdom’s a gift, but you’d trade it for youth / Age is an honor, it’s still not the truth,” Koenig sings. Just because you can look back on something with a shake of the head, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily better off now than you were then. Humble insights put to an incessantly catchy tune? Must be a new Vampire Weekend song.
2. Hannah Hunt
With a baseline almost straight from Souls Of Mischief’s you half expect frontman Ezra Koenig to freestyle on this track. He doesn’t spit 16, but he does drop some wisdom about time and love, god and women. And maybe I’m reading this wrong, but “Though we live on the U.S. dollar / you and me, we / got our own sense of time” echoes “This is how we chill from 93 ’til…” to the T. In all seriousness, “Hannah Hunt” is probably the most lyrically and musically gorgeous song on “Modern Vampires of the City,” which is saying something considering its competition. The second half of the song is explosive, rendering its initial fragility as something of a front, an understated series of events quietly waiting to burst through the seams. It’s a neat turn, and perfectly executed.
1. Ya Hey
There’s a reason the band elected for a lyrical crawl for “Step” and “Ya Hey.”
I didn’t think much of “Ya Hey” when I first heard it. It was pleasant enough, but it just didn’t strike me in any meaningful way. When I watched the music video for the song though, it clicked. God hangs heavy over the track (tellingly a lower case “g” “god” in the video), as does anger and unrequited love. In a sense, it’s Vampire Weekend’s version of “Bad Religion,” which is a version of Radiohead’s “Creep” and backward through the time until the age of sonnets. In another sense, it splits Vampire Weekend’s strongest instincts: 1) nifty music and 2) stories that stick to your brain’s ribs. In both realms, “Ya Hey” is soundly resonant.
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Dylan Owens is Reverb’s indie and bluegrass blogger. You can read more from him in Relix magazine and the comment sections of WORLDSTARHIPHOP.
