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Fully realized debut albums like Vampire Weekend come along once in a great while, and these songs show that this band is smart, but not too smart for their own good.
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It's probably not substantial enough that it will stick in my head all year (and possibly not even until the ground thaws), but it is a highly enjoyable pop album from a young group who are riding some hype and getting slapped with backlash at the same time.
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Alternative PressThier debut album is one of the most inventive in recent memory. [Apr 2008, p.153]
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As if on cue amid the recent critical hemming and hawing over indie rock's cultural appropriations drops Vampire Weekend's official debut with enough justified buzz to render the entire debate moot.
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Listeners are only too lucky to get a hot breath of summer fun in these cold winter months.
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Vampire Weekend’s version of globalization is too tightly and smartly woven to be mere dilettantism, and at times Koenig is emphatic, even desperate, about escaping white-bred familiarity.
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At its best, Vampire Weekend takes the exceedingly familiar template of indie rock and invigorates it with a chiming guitar sound that suggests the band has been spending its downtime browsing afropop.org.
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This is a magnificent debut, filled with endless melodies, memorable hooks and plenty of toe-tapping moments.
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It's rather a genuinely exuberant, joyously infectious and sheerly celebratory affair, its tribal drums, parping keyboards and rippling, brassy guitars offset by sweet vocal harmonies and reverb-laden solos, with Koenig's witty and literate lyrics marking out their crucial difference.
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The production throughout Vampire Weekend is perfect, holding all the various threads together as a coherent whole that manages to sound simple without ever being underwhelming.
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Vampire Weekend is an exemplar of contemporary establishment indie rock, sandblasted clean but striking a dirty pose nonetheless.
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It’s ecstatic music, surely; and intense, too, even as it’s joyful.
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What is key to this album's effectiveness is how Vampire Weekend's rhythmic momentum enervates the filler, turning another band's less flamboyant 'Campus' into a cymbal-crash-on-every-hit mini-epic, or the nearly irritating 'Blake's Got a New Face' into drunken singalong.
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Affecting a clarity and delight that pleases the many and confounds the some, their lyrically alluring, structurally hop-skip-and-jumping songs aren't deep. They're just thoughtful fun.
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In places almost carnivalesque, this is a good times album that celebrates positive aspects of the world.
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Their strength is that, musically as well as sartorially, they’re unafraid to plunder and repurpose styles previously considered naffer than Bluetooth headsets.
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Vampire Weekend is indie rock with its edges sanded off, polished to a clean, sparkling sheen.
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At less than 40 minutes long, Vampire Weekend sounds paradoxically both brimming with confidence and something put down as a marker for the future.
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This cosmopolitan quartet has streamlined ska, post-punk, chamber music and Afropop into a glorious ultramodern groove.
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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.
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Not since Talking Heads bowed out with their masterful 1988 swan song Naked has NYC been so dutifully represented by such a melodically robust collection as the 11 that comprise this eponymous redux of Vampire Weekend’s acclaimed “Blue CD-R” demo.
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Vampire Weekend’s debut comes across as a confident, precise, and, for better and worse, mature collection.
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Q MagazineExtremely inventive, a litttle uptight and slightly high on their own cleverness, Vampire Weekend are the musical equivalent of a Wes Anderson movie. [Mar 2008, p.109]
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On their debut, Vampire Weekend mostly earn points the old-fashioned way: by writing likable songs you'll be glad to revisit next month.
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Vampire Weekend's eponymous debut, with its wide range of references rationed across a collection of brief pop morsels, proves the early fascination was no fluke.
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Vampire Weekend have made a truely fresh, fun, and smart record. [Feb 2008, p.91]
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Vampire Weekend banks on showering its tribal pop with lyrics poised for literary analysis, skimping pretentious by appearing completely natural.
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The young band's saving grace is compactness, which not only saves thousands of dollars in kora-player and backup-singer bills, but also keeps things alert and accessible.
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Behind the penny loafers and songs about commas, there's a bold band that can balance dextrous originality with an innate pop sensibility.
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The sheer cleverness of every track is endearing. But it’s also brittle; these songs could use just a little more heart.
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By the end of the album’s blissful, sparse, empty-Saharan-landscape closer 'The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance,' perfection doesn’t seem to matter much anymore--especially when your mind’s too preoccupied on starting Vampire Weekend again from the beginning.
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Cosmopolitan, anglophile, afrobeat--Vampire Weekend are in an Ivy League of their own.
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Under The RadarThis is likely to be the most fun release of the year. [Winter 2008, p.84]
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Although the vocals initially may spark fears of self-indulgent been there’s and done that’s, the musical beast which duels with the lyrics stays on point and goes beyond the point in miraculous fashion.
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VibeVampire Weekend have suceeded in putting the hips back in hipster. [Mar 2008, p.98]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 288 out of 321
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Mixed: 19 out of 321
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Negative: 14 out of 321
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Jul 22, 2011
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AaaronS.May 10, 2008A music blogger sensation earlier this year. Highly overrated pop record that I chalk up to 'I don't get it'.
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Oct 7, 2013