The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Welcome to the Vampire Weekend. Though our favourite New York bands of recent years have fallen from Swiss finishing schools and the richly endowed higher education institutions of America, most of them have aspired to a scuzzy, smacked-out Lower East Side aesthetic. Vampire Weekend are different. Not since yacht rock sailed has being uptown been so en vogue. From their uniform of pressed slacks and Ralph Lauren shirts, to their lyrics set in Cape Cod, to their afro beat sound, Vampire Weekend are summer house rock and proud, conscious that such a set of references are fresh, clean and in sync with a new mood in a cleaned-up New York.

They are in London this drizzly October evening to build the buzz for a forthcoming album on UK indie XL and, as if to prove this is their prep rock moment, keys man Rostam Batmangli reveals that he and singer/lyricist Ezra Koeing used to be in a laptop rap group. “We’d argue about rap music being the most relevant form of music,” he says, “and looking back on it I think he was right. But that time passed.”

All the band are graduates of Columbia - New York’s take on an Ivy League university - and they’ve taken a lot from their alma mater. Alumni include beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, gonzo journo Hunter S. Thompson and Art Garfunkel.

That brings us neatly to the Paul Simon thing. Stand out track ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’ has a chiming African guitar part and a ‘kwassa kwassa’ beat, which, combined with Ezra’s laid-back vocal delivery, has had people reaching straight for the Graceland comparisons. As you’d expect, though, the band claim it’s a gross simplification. Bassist Chris: “To say we’re like ‘Graceland The Band’ is arbitrary. For a lot of people in America, Paul Simon is the main reference point for African music. If you listen to our other songs, like ‘Mansard Roof’, there’s nothing like that there. The drum beat for that song was based on a reggaeton rhythm - the Dem Bow rhythm.”

Picking up the theme, Rostam adds: “I was really into Brenda Fassie (eighties and nineties South African pop star known as the ‘Madonna of The Townships’). She has a couple of songs that are just like straight-up bangers, like a proto M.I.A.”

Then there’s the movie influence. Rostam studied music composition and cut his teeth before Vampire Weekend composing ornate, imaginary film scores. Indeed, their song ‘Walcott’ is about an imaginary movie that gave the band their name. “Ezra wrote that song in January 2006 after he found a trailer he’d made for a movie four years ago,” says Rostam. “‘Walcott’ was about the imaginary story arch of that film, and it was called Vampire Weekend.”

More content of interest...

• Primavera Sound / Parc del Fórum, Barcelona (Posted in 017 June 2008 | Sports)