After just 10 songs, Vampire Weekend became the face of indie rock. Combining Paul Simon's Afro-pop and cardigan sweaters, the four Columbia grads swept the nation with their smug grins stretched ear-to-ear and pretentious dispositions emblazoned on their polos. And now, almost exactly two years later, they return with another rushed venture into half-hearted songwork that tests the limits of what we as listeners demand from our posterboys.
In Contra's press packet, the band members take turns explaining the origins of each song. Apparently, they approached songwriting as attempts to mimic different genres, revealing a scholarly modus operandi that is very telling of their nuanced output. They study the books of worldly genres and then render their interpretations in a songs-as-exams format. However, whether the variances therein are the product of innovation or an elementary understanding that misses the gestalt's more distinguished elements is up for debate, as well as ultimately defining each listener's opinion of this divisive group of complacent crapmongers.
Contra is a more vocal-heavy affair than Vampire Weekend, lead singer Ezra Koenig filling each empty space (and then some) with his high-pitched squeaks and deeper, pensive retrospectives that dig about as deep as the group's frail instrumentation allows. His voice doesn't hold up well in the added attention, though, as his buoyant voice sounds less like a life preserver and more like a nagging mosquito as the album wears on.
They finally succumb to the rhythm section on ""Giving Up the Gun,"" delegating their eighth-note guitar strums to hand muting, but their weightlessness fails to lift the percussive groove off the ground. The bridge hints at an effective breakdown when the bottom falls out, but Koenig's voice idles just long enough that it drops through the floor instead.
""Diplomat's Son"" is the most noticeable holdover from Rostam Batmanglij's electronic side project, Discovery, and, like their self-titled debut, it hashes out the same ideas ad nauseum, borrowing chord progressions from VW's own self-titled debut.
In a nutshell, that's how Contra goes. The band's handful of original ideas is stretched thin to cover 10 songs. They create ample filler by translating their study habits to music, but they don't have enough novel ideas of their own to span a full album. They fill gaps by translating their notes on pop history, but they lack any substantive creative element that might sustain its appeal or propel their own identity. Without injecting their own voice into their songs, they deny themselves the possibility of appearing in the next wave of student-poppers' notebooks.
Contra's lead single, ""Cousins,"" features a hook that sounds lifted straight from the ""Elements of Style: Introduction to Orchestra"" book I used while first learning to play the violin in middle school. My fingers were always too fat and sloppy to truly excel, so I can respect their precision. Forgive my boasting, though, when I tell you that instead of giving up like so many others, I stuck through orchestra for several years. And while my cumbersome hands forced me to the more forgiving fret board of the bass, I can say firsthand that the more complex lessons in the subsequent tutorial books are a lot more interesting. And so it goes with Vampire Weekend. They are sharp, focused and refined, showing commendable prowess and dexterity, but the fact of the matter is they're still a bunch of Ivy Leaguers playing middle school hooks. However, you can't really blame them for cutting out the fat and giving us little to chew on, because the excess consumption would make their wiry frames less attractive in cardigans. And after two full albums of energized plagiarism, that—the smarmy, razor-thin, overly kempt aesthetic—remains the only argument the band has made for themselves as a genre's posterboys.
