Culture

Rating: 3/5

A band like Vampire Weekend requires no introduction. Whether you’ve heard their hip blend of afrorock and indie pop intentionally or by accident, whether you’ve loved it or you’ve hated it – you’ve heard it. Their first two albums, 2008’s Vampire Weekend and 2010’s Contra, came brimming with catchy indie melodies and highly danceable afro-rhythms; but without the sonic adventure of bands like Animal Collective or the bite of a group like The Strokes, Vampire Weekend failed to ever appeal beyond surface charm.

And now comes Modern Vampires Of The City, their allegedly deeper and more experimental third album. Gone is the party-friendly vibe that once defined them. Gone are the strands of world music and electronica that have permeated all of their material to date. Replacing them is a more spacious, focused and choral sound, the kind of pure-hearted and massive-sounding pop that evokes images like cathedrals and – yep, you guessed from the album cover – skylines. The influences on Modern Vampires are less eclectic than Vampire Weekend’s previous albums, drawn almost entirely from the vaults of Western pop and classical music. In short, it’s a hell of an American-sounding album. I’ll leave you to decide whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Credit where credit’s due: Modern Vampires starts off incredibly strong. Album opener and highlight “Obvious Bicycle” does more with Ezra Koenig’s voice, a few piano chords and an indeterminable percussive loop than any quadruply-dense song in Vampire Weekend’s discography. If I were feeling particularly audacious, I’d say the open, wondrous realm the song transports you to make listening to it feel a little like re-emerging from the womb. In just four minutes, “Obvious Bicycle” sums up that beautiful and unnamed common factor that childhood, exploration and the American Dream all share. Really, the song is that moving. What a colossal shame, then, that nothing else on Modern Vampires comes even close.

That isn’t to say any of Modern Vampires’ other 11 songs approach poor, each a perfectly pleasant slab of production-drenched baroque pop (Technicolor anthem “Step” being the choicest cut). But the beauty and profundity of “Obvious Bicycle” can’t help but make you wonder why the band didn’t give that sound even a second incarnation on this album. “Hannah Hunt” and “Young Lion” offer a couple patches of ambient loveliness, but the loveliness feels second-rate in comparison. It is now screamingly obvious that less is more in the Vampire Weekend universe. Why the hell can’t they see that themselves?