Vampire Weekend’s “Contra”: Privilege Doesn’t Sound So Bad Afterall

How you feel about Vampire Weekend’s “Contra” may depend largely on how you feel about its first line: “In December, drinking horchata/I’d look psychotic in a balaclava.” Cute or precious? Witty or repugnant? If you think it’s clever for Ezra Koenig to rhyme a Latin American drink made with rice and sweetened milk with a form of headgear once favored by British soldiers in the Crimean War, then you’ll probably dig the remainder of Koenig’s encyclopedic musings on women and boredom and money. If, on the other hand, you think Koenig’s simply showing off—after all, drinking horchata and realizing you’d look like an idiot in a ski mask aren’t related activities—then “Contra” may try your patience for blue-blooded precocity.

In other words, Vampire Weekend’s sophomore LP (due out on Tuesday) will do little to change the central dynamics of a debate that’s been ranging for two years. VW are either insightful chroniclers of the foibles of upper-middle-class 20-somethings or rank imperialists hanging their Ivy League degrees on a few sharp couplets. F. Scott Fitzgerald or Rudyard Kipling.

But while VW may still be a polarizing band, they’re now a much better band. On “Contra,” Koenig peppers his tunes with the same upper-class signifiers (backyard pools, vacations in the Alps), but now they’re surrounded by richer, wilder, more beautiful music. And though the ethnic influences are still there—surely enough to rankle some feathers—they’re treated with greater care and respect.

“California English” starts off with an auto-tuned Koenig (!) slamming verses over something like a calypso beat, before it rushes into a Bollywood-flavored chorus, slams into an Afro-pop guitar solo, veers back into another one of Koenig’s frantic verses before finding its way to a string quartet breakdown (courtesy of multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij) and the casually brilliant line: “Sweet carob rice cakes/You don’t care how the sweets taste/Fake Philly cheese steak/But you use real toothpaste.” And that’s all in the first 90 seconds.

The rest of “Contra” is just as jam-packed with ideas—some rehashed from earlier material, others, like that T-Pain tribute, plucked straight out of left field. It’s third-wave ska one minute (“Holiday”) and Miami Sound Machine the next (“Run”). There’s Kalimba thumb piano, dancehall synths, and harpsichord; reggaeton, baile funk, and sampled M.I.A. “Contra” is heavy with miscegenated genres, yet the ship never sinks. With the band’s frighteningly agile rhythm section (drummer Christopher Tomson, bassist Chris Baio), the songs race along like they’ve got nothing to prove and everywhere to go. VW’s self-titled debut sounds limp-wristed and petty in comparison.

Koenig’s voice has never been sweeter or his vignettes richer. It isn’t all about highbrow cultural references any more (though those are certainly still there). Koenig’s friends and lovers are real people, not just starched shirts. On the stately ballads “I think UR A Contra” and “Taxi Cab,” Koenig worries over a girl he can’t nail down, an “aristocrat” who “wanted good schools and friends with pools,” “rock ’n’ roll and complete control.” While on “Giving Up the Gun”—a bittersweet stadium house tune unlike anything the boys have done before—Koenig memorializes a friend (or is it himself) who used to “play guitar down at a city bar/where skinheads used to fight,” but whose “sword” now lies “old and rusty/burned beneath the rising sun.“

Vampire Weekend’s primary sin isn’t that they’re aloof and over-educated. It’s that they’re aloof and over-educated on top of a sound and an image that says exactly the same thing. In the past, intellectual, well-read rock stars (wealthy or not)—from John Lennon to Thom Yorke—still played loud guitars in rock ‘n’ roll bands. They still did drugs and wore their hair long. Koenig and co. have done the opposite: Their music is just as mannered as their pronunciation. There’s nothing ragged or edgy or sexy about it. And that, despite the music’s quality, rubs people the wrong way—and understandably so.

All of which takes us back to that whole horchata/balaclava bit. Either you’ll get past it, in which case you’ll hear some fairly ingenious pop music. Or you won’t.