I finally picked up the Vampire Weekend the other day. I've heard them in bars, at shows, on Beki's computer, and in cars. It's a fine record and I'm sure I'll make time to listen to it between bouts of listening to the TV On the Radio catalog and Bad Brains' I Against I.



So what makes Vampire Weekend so great? It's hard to argue against the singing. The vaguely African/Caribbean/Brazilian/Ska/ sound is pleasant, a less offensive version of what the Unicorns/Islands have done so well. The earnest songs from the pov of a trust-fund twenty-something works to great effect. I was in a friend's car a few months ago and had a chance to look through the liner notes (I have the emusic version, so know liner notes for me). I stopped on a photo of a lone topsider on a colored background (I have in my mind a pleasant pastel). I turned to my friend and said, "This tells you what this albums sounds like more than listening to it." Vampire Weekend has captured a moment in hip twenty-something culture. They are literate, funny, talented kids who have distilled the prepster aesthetic to it's essence and packaged it as music and a touring band. They'll probably never make another great record, but they made this one, and it captures the ironic, creative moment of Williamsburg and cool part of Manhattan perfectly.

This leads to questions about why so many young, hyped bands only have one great record in them. Do they put everything in there and they don't have any good ideas left? I don't think so. I think many of the albums that you'll find toward the top of a Pitchfork year-end list aren't great works of art, they're great representations of a moment in a certain culture. I don't mean to diminish these works. They are often very good and worthy of our praise and dollars, but I think it's unfair to expect Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to capture a moment in time more than once. The members of Interpol did blow their wad on Turn On the Bright Lights, they are just limited, but what they could do was exactly what was happening in 2002.






So it's likely Vampire Weekend won't be able to win on their next album. Either they continue to sing about college campuses and clam bakes but that moment has passed or they try and capture the community again but no one will care what they have to say or they'll try harder to make a great work but won't have the talent. Or maybe they do have the talent and they'll surprise us all. But give them a break if they don't, it's hard to distill your culture twice, just ask Girl Talk.