Vampire Weekend ~ Modern Vampires of the City

With this being the first review posted, I should open with a few explanatory notes.

1. I plan on using a scale of 1 to 10. I know some people don't care for this type of review system, since the score of any album truly is relative and arbitrary; but, it allows for easier comparison between different albums. Also, I'm sort of obsessed with rating/ranking things for some reason, and nothing else more so than music.
2. While I do intend to review new albums as often as I can, I don't have the connections or financial means to acquire every new album as soon as it's released. And on top of that, I don't like the idea of posting any reviews here before I've given the album a fair shot. This doesn't necessarily entail a certain number of listen-throughs, but it does certainly require more than one or two.
3. If you are reading this review and thinking to yourself, "Oh, Vampire Weekend, I hate that kind of hipster trash;" or; "Oh, Vampire Weekend, I hope this is the kind of stuff that's always on here!" then I have a few things to say to you before you either stop reading or immediately bookmark this page (actually, go ahead and do the latter, regardless of what else I say). 
1. If you have a bad perception of a band whose album I'm posting on here, you don't have to read that review - OR - you could forget about perceptions (especially if they're based on very little listening experience) and see how your opinion compares to mine after a fair listen.
2. I promise that I will post about bands both very different from and rather similar to Vampire Weekend in the future, so even if this review has nothing for you, another one in a week or two could be exactly what you want to read.

And, now that I've bored to death all of you reading this, I'll actually go ahead and give my take on Modern Vampires.

8.1

Certain music sites, such as Pitchfork (some day soon I'll discuss how my love/hate relationship with that site has affected my take on music and reviews in particular) touted Modern Vampires as the album of 2013. I would be lying if I said that wasn't a large reason why it's the first review to grace this page, but I would also be lying if I said that I completely agree with all the praise the album received. It definitely did a lot to capture the zeitgeist of 2013, at least among those in Vampire Weekend's general audience. And it definitely showed an increased maturity, both musically and lyrically by the band. But, I think those points have been blown out of proportion by many listeners/critics.

Starting with the positives - and don't get that opening paragraph wrong, there are plenty of positives - these songs are considerably more thought-provoking than just about anything on Vampire Weekend or Contra. "Ya Hey," despite the odd, whining repetition of its title, is actually a quite serious affair, where lead singer Ezra Koenig directly confronts God, "I am that I am," wondering "who could ever live that way." And yet, for all the serious posturing, I hesitate to give Koenig too much credit for questioning God - it's not exactly the first time pop culture has done that. But, the questions raised do come with what feels like deep sincerity, which is refreshing and definitely creates a feeling of sympathy between the listener and the lyrics. A similar, though even more intense sincerity is found in "Hannah Hunt," arguably the strongest song in Vampire Weekend's entire catalog. More through the music than the actual lyrics, they really do convince the listener that they have their "own sense of time" here. Also, the chorus of the song just has a way of staying lodged in your head for days, or at least it did in mine.

On the other hand, Vampire Weekend is still a fun-loving, rap-inspired indie band who, as a friend of mine once bluntly pointed out, "have no idea what a chord is." About half of the songs on Modern Vampires could be transplanted onto Contra and only slightly alter the feel of that previous album. Not that there's anything bad about the sound Vampire Weekend have created over the past 7 years, but it is a very distinct and fairly monolithic sound. Also, while that sound is crafted to fit a more mature and deep album expertly on Modern Vampires, the upbeat handclaps of "Diane Young" and rapid-action vocals that open "Worship You" seem to distract from an overall theme of growing up and taking life more seriously. But then again, in the band's own words: "wisdom's a gift, but you'd trade it for youth / age is an honor - it's still not the truth."