Vampire Weekend

If there's anything the happy New York kids in this band have learned from listening to African music, it's the difference between "pop" and "rock": Vampire Weekend's debut album announces straight off that it's the former. The first sound on the first song, "Mansard Roof", comes from Rostam Batmanglij's keyboard, set to a perky, almost piping tone-- the kind of sunny sound you'd hear in old west-African pop. Same goes for Ezra Koenig's guitar, which never takes up too much space; it's that clean, natural tone you'd get on a record from Senegal or South Africa. Chris Baio's bass pulses and slides and steps with light feet, and most of all there's Chris Tomson, who plays like a percussionist as often as he does a rock drummer, tapping out rhythms and counter-accents on a couple of drums in the back of the room. And yet they play it all like indie kids on a college lawn, because they're not hung up on Africa in the least-- a lot of these songs work more like those on the Strokes' debut, Is This It?, if you scraped off all the scuzzy rock'n'roll signifiers, leaving behind nothing but clean-cut pop and preppy new wave, tucked-in shirts and English-lit courses.

This Afro/preppy/new-wave combination has a history-- Brits like Orange Juice, Americans like Talking Heads. For now, though, it's one of the most deservedly buzzed-about things around: People have been chattering over Vampire Weekend ever since a CD-R demo of three of these songs started circulating last year. (Full disclosure: One of the sound engineers of that CD-R now does freelance audio work for Pitchfork.) The excitement isn't hard to fathom. People spend a lot of time poking around for the edgy new underground thing, convinced that plain old pop songs have been done to death. But Vampire Weekend come along like Belle & Sebastian and the Strokes each did, sounding refreshingly laidback and uncomplicated, and with simple set-ups that make good songs sound exceedingly easy. (The result being not "this is mind-blowing," or "this is catchy," but "I have listened to this, straight through, four times a day for the past month".)

No surprise, then, that their first hit mp3 would be a song called "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa", which is sly, quiet, and casual in a way that blows away so many other bands who actively try to get your attention. Their label seems to have understood this effect, and so they've left these demos sounding as natural as they were: This release just fiddles with the mastering, switches out a few takes in ways you wouldn't much notice, plays with the sequencing, relegates one song to a B-side, and adds a couple of great ones that you can nonetheless understand being omitted the first time.

Most of the credit will wind up going to Koenig, who's the star presence here. By the second song, "Oxford Comma", the band is ticking along on little touches of keyboard and the tap of a snare drum, and he's still keeping the empty space captivating: There's a little indie yelp to his voice, but mostly he's relaxed, conversational, and wry. (Not unlike another guy who's tried on an Afro-suave sound-- though Paul Simon never sounded this exuberant.) The person who'll probably never get enough credit turns out to be Batmanglij, whose pat, classicist keyboard arpeggios lead the way through tempo shifts and transitions, occasionally locking in with some sprightly violin parts. It all comes off as simple, jaunty, and homespun, but there's a lot of precision lurking beneath-- exactly what happens when you combine a music major and indie-pop.

Koenig is smart and lucky, in that he gets to play the preppy angle both ways: Like a guy who's read a lot of Cheever, he can summon up the atmosphere of kids whose parents use "summer" as a verb and give it all the hairy eyeball at the same time. "Oxford Comma" is spent picking on someone who brags too much about money: "Why would you lie about how much coal you have?/ Why would you lie about something dumb like that?" (Then again, there's nothing more moneyed than having the luxury to find money tacky, and when Koenig adds that Lil Jon "always tells the truth," you kind of suspect Lil Jon wouldn't find how much "coal" someone has to be all that irrelevant.)

Later, walking across the Columbia University campus, Koenig drops a detail whose delivery always gets a smile from me, even if its thrust is hard to gauge: "You spilled kefir on your keffiyeh." Koenig is a detail guy, a happy observer who never much bores you with how he feels; mostly, as befits a recent college grad, he's singing about location, about where people will go and whether they'll come back with new faces. In non-album B-side "Ladies of Cambridge", he can't decide whether to move there with the girl or mourn letting her go alone; "Walcott" whirls you through Cape Cod and then suggests getting the hell out ("Bottleneck is a shit show/ Hyannisport is a ghetto"); the twitchy "A-Punk" sees one person off to New Mexico while another stays near college and finds a place in Washington Heights. And while the faux-African backing vocals on "One" might be the album's only real misstep, the final line sums up where its concerns are: "All your collegiate grief has left you/ Dowdy in sweatshirts/ Absolute horror!"

Of course, while Vampire Weekend have certainly benefited from our new music world of internet buzz, plenty of people have found reasons to hate Vampire Weekend from the first note, many of them having to do with their prep aesthetic and Ivy League educations-- Oxford shirts, boat shoes, Columbia University. But it just so happens that we're in a moment where such things matter to people: As interest grows in clean-cut, clever indie-pop, plenty of folks would like to hear things get dirtier, riskier, less collegiate-- and in a lot of corners of the indie landscape, they thankfully are. But here's another odd parallel with that first Strokes record: Vampire Weekend have the same knack for grabbing those haters and winning them over. Bring any baggage you want to this record, and it still returns nothing but warm, airy, low-gimmick pop, peppy, clever, and yes, unpretentious-- four guys who listened to some Afro-pop records, picked up a few nice ideas, and then set about making one of the most refreshing and replayable indie records in recent years.

Kid Cudi "Man On the Moon, Vol. II: The Legend of Mr. Rager"

On the surface Kid Cudi‘s Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager is an ambitious 17-track drug-fueled diary detailing dark times and the forces behind them. Beneath the surface however, Rageris a cautionary tale which captures Cudi’s shift away from one stage of his life to the next. As he explained to Spin‘s Sean Fennessey recently, “It’s a chapter of my life I’m closing.” He continued by describing the album as being “for those whom cocaine does not work.” Following a year which included a high-profile arrest and a trail of drug use which seemingly followed Cudi everywhere he went, the MC now claims a clean(er) lifestyle, relating his new perspective during the cover story for Complexmagazine’s fall issue. “Yup. No more blow. People do drugs to camouflage emotions and run away from their problems. Now I’m going to deal with certain things as they come, prioritize shit—man up, so to speak.” So where does that leave Cudi now, and how does all of this personal growth translate through his new album? In short: a clear mind is apparently of little detriment to the 26 year old superstar. The dark themes that run throughout Rager can be largely summed up by a lyrical blast in the second of the album’s five acts. With “Mojo So Dope” Cudi lays out the blueprint for the hour-long journey, “Damn, you must understand, when I speak about a song this is really how I am/Yeah, this is how I really think, you could see what I see, yes I really think/Yes I really drink, I really do rage.” And as referenced in the vocalist’s statement which lumped drug use and emotional instability together, there are indeed many issues which need to be uncovered here, and Rager simply appears to be the first step in Cudi’s emotional rehabilitation .Enhanced by Cee Lo‘s stunning chorus, the album opens with “Scott Mescudi vs. the World,” a track which sets the stage for conflict immediately with the opening bar, “What up?/How’s everyone doing?/You’re now in a world I’m ruining.” The track’s thumping beat sets a musical tone which is felt throughout, but it’s the young MC’s confusion and struggles which push the album to its full potential. The hollow beat in “Wild’n Cuz I’m Young” only goes to reflect the emptiness portrayed through the lyrics, Cudi speaking of his late father’s habits being passed down to him. Sampling St. Vincent‘s ominous “The Strangers,” “Maniac” finds Cudi appropriately joined by underground MC Cage/ whose 2009 release wholly focused on “exorcising demons.” Late in the album “All Along” again points out the insecurity which has hidden at the core of Cudi’s life, “All along, I guess I’m meant to be alone, out there on my own.” Self-admittedly however, Cudi’s emotions took a back seat to the drug use in his real life, and the same can be said for much of the stories in Rager.

Early on in the album Mary J. Blige steps in with “Don’t Play This Song,” working behind Cudi as he rumbles over a low-key beat, “HBO, that Vitamin Water: that’s money to blow.” And as history has proven time and time again, an excessive amount of expendable income mixed with mental instability and a taste for candy rarely ends well. “Marijuana” find a repeating chorus take precedent over any real substance, “Pretty green bud, all in my blood” (the song closes at four minutes and twenty seconds with Cudi cheekily adding, “aaaaaaand 4:20”). Blige returns for “These Worries” as Cudi parallels his substance intake and subsequent abuse with his teetering sanity, “It’s a full-time job not to lose my faith”; adding an aural coke snort and morning-after inventory (“So much whiskey all in my liver”) for good measure. The main focus of the album is Cudi’s alluded-to twist in perspective though, and the greater part of Rager reflects that shift. Coasting through the album’s infectious production—supplied by any number of talents ranging from Bruno Mars‘ Smeezingtons crew to Jim Jonsin to Cudi, himself—is a series of key tracks which help direct the artist toward his conclusion found in album-closer “Trapped in My Mind.” “REVOFEV” finds Cudi checking himself, “Wake up, things might get rough/No need to stress, keeps you down too much,” while “We Aite (Wake Up Your Mind)” thematically follows Cudi as he opens his eyes to the world, and “GHOST!” finds Cudi dumbfounded in his density, “Got to get it through my thick head that I was so close to being dead.” Most interesting is the epiphany found in “Ashin’ Kusher” however, where the vocalist takes a step back from the static and blasts those who have judged him for his past indiscretions, “If you know me man, I don’t really worry ’bout a nigga tryin’ to judge: Who are you, Judy?” While those approaching Rager with any expectations are likely to be surprised, most are likely to be satisfied with the results. That being said, there are some tracks that stand out for their inconsistencies. “The Mood” is out of place, lyrically, as it follows a story of sexing it up with a French female, and its beat isn’t strong enough to demand that it make the final cut amongst the album’s already-lengthy track list. Just as those who went into Man on the Moon I with only “Day ‘n’ Nite” in mind to prepare them, those who are only familiar with “Erase Me” are in for a shock. The song is enjoyable, and Kanye West‘s cameo stands as one of the highlights of the record, but the song isn’t musically representative of Rager and is merely a palette cleanser that Cudi himself has brushed off for having been created on a whim. As the story comes to a close with “Trapped in My Mind,” Cudi seems to have answered the question of whether or not he has made it out of the past year with a shred of sanity. Concluding that being trapped in his mind is no longer a curse, Cudi digresses by simply embracing his new found comfort, “Hey it’s not that bad at all.” Therein lies Cudi’s mission statement as he goes forward with his next projects: to hold true to himself his feelings, and continue to learn how to approach them in a healthy fashion rather than suppressing them as he’s done in the past. While he’s known for proudly wearing an ego so self-assured that it might only be on par with his good friend Kanye, what Kid Cudi has created with his sophomore album shows exponential growth, as an artist and as a person, from the tight-pants MC who made it big a few years back. Now all that remains is to go forward and keep progressing; as GLC rhymes in “The End,” “My brother told me a long time ago, don’t focus where you bein’ G, focus where you tryin’ to go.”

Track Listing
Scott Mescudi vs. the World, Revofev, Don't Play This Song, We Aite (Wake Your Mind Up), Marijuana, Mojo So Dope, Ashin' Kusher, Erase Me, Wild'n Cuz I'm Young, The Mood, Maniac, Mr. Rager, These Worries, The End, All Along, Ghost!, Trapped In My Mind