Contra

With a mix of frantic and scrappy pop songs alongside blankets of processed peacefulness ‘Contra’ is a fun and always intriguing listen. Vampire Weekend remain the most unlikely crowd pleasers and long may they continue to make the unapproachable not just relevant but entirely necessary.

While Koenig rarely shies away from scholastic lyricizing, Contra succeeds apart from its cultural asides and college textbook hat-tips.

If Vampire Weekend was Rushmore, Contra is their Royal Tenenbaums: brainy, confident and generally awesome.

New York prepsters stick to their Paul Simon-goes-indie formula on successful second album.

Far more than a companion piece of leftover ideas, the album is light, musically savvy and, for the most part, pulls off a thick dose of shamelessly sunny pop across all of its 10 tracks.

This is a momentous return, one that any subsequent decade will look at kindly. It’s yet another record that captures the sound of Brooklyn, but its ideas are wealthy and the band’s urge to try something new evident.

These vamps are far from dead.

There are some mis-steps – California English employs Auto-Tune about two years too late – but overall this is a fine follow-up to their successful debut.

Contra may not propose much of a rebuttal to those who thumbed their nose up at the band’s past work, but it’s not difficult to see how it could strengthen their core audience while netting them some new fans at the same time. These aren’t songs that will define boundaries or alter music’s landscape as much as help refine and expand them.

Compared to the mulch churned out by far too many, Contra will cut through most of the stuff on the radio like sunshine through clouds.

With Contra, Vampire Weekend make Auto-Tune and real live guitars, Mexican drinks, Jamaican riffs and Upper West Side strings belong together, and this exciting lack of boundaries offers more possibilities than anyone could have expected.

They’re “interesting,” and if this sophomore album is any consideration of their lasting power, let’s just say they bought themselves two more years. Home run, preppies.

Vampire Weekend’s willingness to write an album of exciting new material, rearranging the very core of the sound they’ve come to be known for, will be maddening on first listen for those who loved their debut—but those who stick it out will discover that there’s a more mature, innovative band in its place.

The balance of classical, rock, and world instrumentation, cagey rhythms, and stunning prettiness isn’t just architecturally resplendent, it’s reassuringly sweet and strangely moving.

With their second album Vampire Weekend have escaped their collegiate niche without sacrificing their true essence.

If you liked Vampire Weekend, you will like Contra. It really is that simple.

No one can surely blame them for sticking to what they do best, particularly when they’re capable of conjuring up tunes as deliriously hook-ridden as the majority of ‘Contra’.

Contra is like the vacant-looking blonde girl in Ralph Lauren that adorns the front cover; interesting on one level but after a while those studied postures, for the first time, seem disappointingly shallow.

Contra doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of their debut but certainly doesn’t write off this still young band who undoubtedly still have plenty to offer.

Contra doesn’t contain as much pop smarts as their eponymous debut, but then that record was such an explosion of ideas and styles that this seems more considered by comparison.

Contra is a solidly entertaining, well-constructed album, and if people take to it, the tendency to mock the band will, I think, fade, simply because it doesn’t have obviously unfashionable moments to feel uneasy about.

Alas, we are weary. None of Contra‘s scant virtues can move us.

It’s too bad. I’ll trade a good album for a scathing — or, in this case, indifferent — critique any day.