If there’s anything the happy New York kids in this band have learned from listening to African music, it’s the difference between “pop” and “rock”: Vampire Weekend’s debut album announces straight off that it’s the former. The first sound on the first song, “Mansard Roof,” comes from Rostam Batmanglij’s keyboard, set to a perky, almost piping tone—the kind of sunny sound you’d hear in old West African pop. Same goes for Ezra Koenig’s guitar, which never takes up too much space; it’s that clean, natural tone you’d get on a record from Senegal or South Africa. Chris Baio’s bass pulses and slides and steps with light feet, and most of all there’s Chris Tomson, who plays like a percussionist as often as he does a rock drummer, tapping out rhythms and counter-accents on a couple of drums in the back of the room. And yet they play it all like indie kids on a college lawn, because they’re not hung up on Africa in the least—a lot of these songs work more like those on the Strokes’ debut, Is This It?, if you scraped off all the scuzzy rock’n’roll signifiers, leaving behind nothing but clean-cut pop and preppy new wave, tucked-in shirts and English-lit courses.
This Afro/preppy/new-wave combination has a history—Brits like Orange Juice, Americans like Talking Heads. For now, though, it’s one of the most deservedly buzzed-about things around: People have been chattering over Vampire Weekend ever since a CD-R demo of three of these songs started circulating last year. (Full disclosure: One of the sound engineers of that CD-R now does freelance audio work for Pitchfork.) The excitement isn’t hard to fathom. People spend a lot of time poking around for the edgy new underground thing, convinced that plain old pop songs have been done to death. But Vampire Weekend come along like Belle and Sebastian and the Strokes each did, sounding refreshingly laidback and uncomplicated, and with simple setups that make good songs sound exceedingly easy. (The result being not “this is mind-blowing,” or “this is catchy,” but “I have listened to this, straight through, four times a day for the past month.”)
No surprise, then, that their first hit MP3 would be a song called “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” which is sly, quiet, and casual in a way that blows away so many other bands who actively try to get your attention. Their label seems to have understood this effect, and so they’ve left these demos sounding as natural as they were: This release just fiddles with the mastering, switches out a few takes in ways you wouldn't much notice, plays with the sequencing, relegates one song to a B-side, and adds a couple of great ones that you can nonetheless understand being omitted the first time.