Critical Backlash: Confessions of a Vampire Weekend Fan

Vampire Weekend at Columbia University / Photo by David Greenwald

I stand corrected: this Vampire Weekend album isn’t just “good,” as I called it a few months back. It’s great. To be fair, my backlash post wasn’t so much backlash as it was merely noting the band sounds more like post-millennial New York indie than Afropop, but all the same, I’ve been listening to it for weeks now and I can’t get enough. The drummer could stand to sound less like Meg White in Africa and the string arrangements (especially on “M79,” the only real stinker of the bunch) are way more stuffy and pretentious than the band’s upper-crust lyrics, but the tunes are mostly winners and singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig is all charm. And sometimes he even sings like he means it, as on “Campus”: “How am I supposed to pretend / I never want to see you again?” According to Lefsetz, the band’s debut has sold over 160k in 10 weeks. They deserve it.

Previously: Critical Backlash – Vampire Weekend

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Critical Backlash is a column where I complain about things.