Interview With A Vampire Weekend

If you were to draw up an indie hype league for 2007 then the US would be currently sitting ten points clear with one game left to play such has been it’s dominance in the emergence of exciting, much talked about bands in the last few months. Black Kids and Yeasayer have kept the bloggers in a job since the summer and we’ll be bringing you more about them in the coming weeks but today’s subject of our admiration is Columbia University’s finest export Vampire Weekend. They crossed the Atlantic to play their debut UK shows recently and Gigwise caught up with them for a chat over nachos “that tasted like Indian food”.

For those of you still virgin to the charms of Vampire Weekend here’s a quick description – think Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ played by four preppie guys who have that undercurrent of New York swagger and confidence framed by guitars crisper than a Wall Street collar. Or in the words of front man Ezra Koenig with out the journalistic spin “simple, clean sounds. Fresh guitar, very simple organ, drum and bass sounds.” The thing most people pick up on first though is the African rhythms which permeate threw several of the quartet’s tracks and this is accentuated by the bands short biog on their Myspace page which simply reads: “The name of this band is Vampire Weekend. We are specialists in the following styles: ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’, ‘Upper West Side Soweto’, ‘Campus’, and ‘Oxford Comma Riddim.’”

“Some of the songs that have the most pronounced African influences we were playing really early on,” explains Ezra. “So that was something we really wanted to pursue but the bigger picture of this band is that we want to make something that sounds new, not boring or clichéd, so African music is part of it in that it’s a music we’re excited about, something that we can draw from but we feel like that about a lot of music.” Before we move on from the subject he adds about the ‘Graceland comparisons: “For a lot of people when they hear a certain African sound the first thing they think of is ‘Graceland’. Which is good for Paul Simon but unfair to thousands of other musicians. I think he did a really good job of fusing different sounds together on that album, but its just one example of many albums that really took different things and made something new and fresh out of it.” Heed those words fellow music journalists.

The four members of Vampire Weekend have been friends since the beginning of College but the band only came into existence eighteen months ago following several years of messing around together in other musical projects. Previously Ezra had been in a “folk, psych” band with Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend keyboard player) and a “rap” group with drummer Chris Tomson which Rostam produced. According to Ezra they “played around campus mostly at first before moving downtown” when they became more serious about the band following their graduation. Before signing to their current home XL they put out a single through New York art-group Space 1026 and were tipped by Talking Heads’ David Byrne after he witnessed them supporting Animal Collective, not a bad start we think you'll agree.