January is pretty rubbish isn’t it? The Christmas celebrations are over, everyone is penniless, the days are short and dark, and this year everyone in Britain is enduring the coldest winter in years. Luckily though, there is a rare glimpse of sunshine as New Yorkers Vampire Weekend welcome in the new decade with their second album, Contra.
The vintage girl on the album cover (who the band claim to know nothing about) acts as a placebo – in fact, the music sounds more ’80s than 21st century. “Horchata” kicks off the album with gentle, percussive verses and rhythmic, tribal choruses, maintaining the band’s tropical, fun-loving foundations on their new material. The band imbues their music with the same enthusiasm and bounciness as The Police, or Paul Simon in his Graceland days.
“Cousins” introduces a more aggressive feel, with its fast paced guitar scales and staccato-like lyrics. Like no other Vampire Weekend track, it feels like the band trying to move away from the first album’s ‘happy-go-lucky’ vibe. The album bows out with “I Think UR a Contra”: quivering guitars and faint vocals combine well with a steady piano riff and an elegant string section to form a very mature composition.
The only real problem with this album is Erza Koenig’s overuse of Autotune on his voice on “Californian English”. Perhaps it’s just me, but I wish we had left the ‘crank up the Autotune’ vocal technique in the last decade. It makes a perfectly good singer like Koenig sound like the pitch-shift effect found on cheap keyboards.
Most bands dread the “difficult second album”, but Vampire Weekend seemed to have pulled it off with relative ease. It’s a hard one to get right: you don’t want to sound too similar to the first, but you don’t want to change the sound so much that you sound like a new band. Contra is a natural progression from their debut: an evolution, in fact, and warm enough to help you forget about the winter blues, at least until your central heating packs in.
Our Verdict:
Jamie Hewitt is a musician and producer based in Dundee. 
