(50) Sundays of Music: #5

#5: Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend


I remember it was the late winter/early spring of 2008 when my roommate said he was going to take up an offer that our college radio station WEGL had put out and go to DJ training. They said I should get on it but I decided to apply my time to volunteering for the school newspaper (sidenote: I ended up doing one volunteer article and joining the radio station in the summer, staying until I graduated in the summer of 2010).

Now that WEGL was in our crosshairs (if my roommate was going to be a DJ, I was going to go up there as well) we started listening. I was riding in the car with one of my other friends when we decided to tune in and heard two back-to-back songs from this "new artist" that the DJ really liked. WEGL was real big on listeners calling in so I dialed the number and asked what those songs were because we really liked them. His response was "oh yea man, that was Vampire Weekend. Their cd just came out. You should pick it up - it's really good."

The two songs he played were the leadoff singles, "Mansard Roof" and "A-Punk" off Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut. I was hooked.

I give a lot of credit to WEGL for my discovery of a lot of bands, including Mumford and Sons and MGMT. And that station definitely gets credit for Vampire Weekend. When we went up there, we started playing some of the tracks other dj's had put in rotation. We fell in love with "Oxford Comma" if not for the intensely amusing line "Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?" in a song that also contained a shout-out to Lil John.

Vampire Weekend's sound was different to a guy who had never really tapped into that genre before. I remember finally picking up the full cd for myself and loving every song, a true rarity. Even when I put it on now, I have visions of sitting in the hall waiting for my teacher to arrive, meanwhile trying to figure out what he was saying in some of the songs.

The music to me was just plain fun. All the instruments combined to provide a sound that just made me smile, such as with "M79" and "Walcott." Other tracks such as "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" and "Bryn" made me want to go to the beach and just chill.

But as with most of my favorites, what places them on my top 5 is their ability to slow it down as well. "I Stand Corrected" is a heart-felt song where I actually feel the emotion with the buildup and the album closer "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance" is the perfect way to close out the hurricane of sound found on the cd.

And then there's "Campus." Like I said, this album is timeless, as I can still listen today and get into it, but I put it on when I was stressing about my ex-girlfriend coming back to school and this song spoke to me with the lines "And I see you, you're walking across the campus"..."How am I supposed to pretend, I never want to see you again?" I know the context was different than what I was going through, but it spoke to me nonetheless.

A lot of people have their "college-defining" music. Vampire Weekend's debut release is certainly on that soundtrack for me.