NYLON - March 2008 - (Page 152) SUCKER PUNCH With their fondness for topsiders and Afrobeat, Vampire Weekend look and sound nothing like their name suggests. But they’re still totally fang-tastic. By Lauren Harris. Photographed by Vorassi You might already know a thing or two about Vampire Weekend. It’s been hard to avoid them, really: In the last few months of 2007, the band received adulatory write-ups in the unlikely likes of The New Yorker and Vogue, getting more press coverage than most mainstream musicians— and all before they even had a record deal. The buzz was fueled by four tracks they posted on MySpace and a series of spectacular live shows, and now, with last month’s release of their self-titled debut album, it’s only getting louder. Self-described specialists in a genre they’ve dubbed “Upper West Side Soweto,” singer Ezra Koenig, drummer Christopher Tomson, bassist Chris Baio, and keyboardist Rotsam Batmanglij met at Columbia University and bonded over a common interest in music. “We had been friends and [were] always talking about music and doing different projects, including a number of folk bands,” says Tomson. After an ill-fated stint as folk outfit Ezra and the Thanes, the band decided to fuse the pop music bedrock of their influences (the Beatles, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones) with strains of Afro-pop, and in doing so, created infectiously rhythmic, brightly melodic songs that float like a Frisbee through the quad. The band have alchemized their Eastern Seaboard backgrounds, metropolitan lifestyles, and interest in Third World exoticism to refract subject matter that’s just as diverse. “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” (the enjambment of a blue-blood enclave and a Congolese dance rhythm) rhymes “reggaeton” with “Louis Vuitton.” Elsewhere Koenig’s lyrics traverse Dharmsala and 79th Street, and “Walcott,” the first song the band ever played together, sounds ready-made for a Wes Anderson film, with its playful strings and plucky guitars. The song is one of the only nods to the origin of the band’s name, tracing the journey of Koenig’s protagonist in a short film he made several years ago entitled Vampire Weekend. About being hailed in the press as the world’s primary purveyors of “prep rock,” the band are a bit uncomfortable: Though they bear some of the hallmarks of prep culture (suburban upbringings, Ivy League educations, songs about punctuation and French architecture), Vampire Weekend are quick to correct such lazy assignations. “It’s interesting that people sometimes describe our music as preppy when that’s not really a thing,” says Koenig. “If someone wanted to write a long essay about how they felt our music was preppy or how we’re part of a genre, that would be interesting.” In actuality, the band have meticulously curated their image, and in so doing, widened their breadth from band to full-scale art project. “I think that people don’t get this, but in terms of a grander scheme, it is a project. From album to album I think we will surprise people, in the sense that we’re not going to pursue one aesthetic and keep developing that over our albums,” says Batmanglij, who produced the album at various locations in New York City. “We’re totally conscious of everything that we put out there: musically, lyrically and visually,” adds Koenig, who is wearing a yellow sweater embroidered with what look to be English Springer Spaniels. Koenig’s sweater seems to be the ideal complementary attire to the band’s music, with its nod to J.Crew catalogs of yore and country clubs. “The third album will be long-sleeved T-shirts with T-shirts on top,” laughs Koenig. “Yeah,” deadpans Baio, “we’ve got 10 album’s worth of outfits.”
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