Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Vampire Weekend – Horchata

Get those creases ironed…



[Website]
[5.79]

Spencer Ackerman: I used to say that Vampire Weekend was 2008’s Tapes-n-Tapes, but it appears they have staying power. What they don’t have is a second act. Do you like cute polysyllabic rhymes (horchata/balaclava)? Did Mom play “Graceland” for you during long car trips and you sung along to the Ladysmith Black Mambazo parts? Then Vampire Weekend are still your jam!
[7]

Alex Ostroff: No matter what they did, Vampire Weekend were bound to prompt the same knee-jerk love/disgust as the first time round, so our Ivy League Afropoppers troll their haters with even more gleeful rhymes about class signifiers — aranciata, horchata, and so forth. Thankfully, they’ve also remembered to bring Ezra’s tunes, and Rostam’s arrangements, which are stuffed full of details, yet still spacious enough to breathe. Contra is all well and good, but they may as well have named their sophomore album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s Exactly What I Am x1000000. SO THERE!.
[8]

Alex Macpherson: It’s odd that Vampire Weekend’s Ivy League preppiness should be the focus of so much criticism. East Coast privilege should surely be a little bit more interesting than mispronounced references to ethnic cuisine over a pale, prissy take on Jon Brion. “Horchata” is a woefully underwritten, melodically slight song that evokes nothing whatsoever; Vampire Weekend seem unable to funnel their precocity towards any sort of purpose, undermining their clever-cleverness somewhat. (Compare the equally wilfully pretentious Fiona Apple, whose vastly superior songwriting skills meant that she nailed the same aesthetic on “Extraordinary Machine” four years ago.) Of course, “Horchata” could still be a pleasantly insubstantial trifle – except that dude still can’t song worth a damn.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: Ezra Koenig seduces with highly specific, yet context-free, details that pop up to the song’s surface the way old memories do. “Horchata” intertwines the coziness of reminiscence with the coziness of wintertime warmth, accentuating the plain domesticity of small moments, such as the oddly evocative “look down your glasses at the Aranciata” and the awkward “With lips and teeth to ask how my day went.” “You’d remember,” the singer urges, and, trying to stir the same memories in the song’s object: “Here comes a feeling you thought you’d forgotten.” Then the Afro-pop affectations yield to the swirl of blue-blood strings, and Koenig’s voice swells: “You had it, but — oh no — you lost it/Looking back you shouldn’t have fought it,” and it turns out that this collection of fleeting moments and proper nouns is far more emotional than its sense of propriety is willing to allow.
[8]

Chris Boeckmann: In twenty years, when Ezra Koenig has scored a teaching position at the English dept of, like, Hampshire College, I hope one of his students calls him out on these terrible lyrics and then some other potheads in the back join in: “Like, yeah, man, why can’t Avey Tare teach us?”
[2]

Ian Mathers: As a minor fan, I can honestly say I’ve gotten used to worse lines and phrasing from these guys than “I’d look psychotic in a balaclava,” but it’s certainly up there. Worse, I haven’t gotten used to it yet, and while the sound here is still pleasingly clean and pretty, I’m not hearing a real chorus here. It may grow on me (even the worst songs on the debut did), but right now it sounds more like an album track than a single. And yet, perversely, Ezra Koenig still seems more likable than not to me.
[6]

Anthony Easton: It is a little too literal, the metaphors strung too thin, and the percussion has a kind of Lion King vibe, and his singing, his dicition has a exotica lounge tinge that I don’t think he intended, but I kind of love it, for how it loves language, how it luxuriates around the title word, but also even in rhymes like handle/sandal.
[9]

Iain Mew: Taking the template of much of their debut a bit further, this is my favourite Vampire Weekend song yet. The verses look utterly ridiculous in writing but tied to the elegant, flowing melody they work with no issue. Best of all is the match of “Here comes a feeling you’d thought you’d forgotten” to the piled up rhythms that follow – every time they kick in from nowhere it does feel like nostalgia turning into vivid, immediate life.
[9]

Alfred Soto: I assume this song is about childhood or some other special time when pincher crabs pinched his sandals and chairs were really chairs. For those of us who thought their first album was good because they wrote about the people and places they knew, it’s a drag to discover that they assume nostalgia is a place instead of a state – one that they’re both too young and too old to exploit for material.
[5]

Anthony Miccio: If this single is indicative of the whole, Ezra Koenig is pushing the kind of frou-frou froth on Vampire Weekend’s second album that Dave Wakeling, Paul Weller, Terry Hall and Sting couldn’t muster until their second full-time band. I guess the internet really does speed up career trajectories.
[5]

Doug Robertson: This isn’t so much a Vampire Weekend track, more what you would get if you wanted one of their tracks for an advert, couldn’t clear it and so commissioned someone to come up with something that sounded as close as possible to it without getting sued.
[4]

John M. Cunningham: I appreciate that there now exists a musical ode to the delicious rice drink I’ve downed at many a late-night taqueria, and I don’t even begrudge the fact that it’s basically an excuse for some conspicuously clever couplets. At the same time, I can’t help thinking that “Horchata” is the sound of last year’s “it” band coasting: the vocal melody’s half-formed, the meandering xylophone’s no match for the sharp guitar riffs that usually counteract Ezra Koenig’s mewl, and the familiar baroque orchestration near the end feels like an afterthought. Here’s hoping that this release, which comes more than three months before the new album is due, is meant as a stopgap rather than a highlight.
[5]

Additional Scores

Chuck Eddy: [6]
Edward Okulicz: [4]

6 Responses to “Vampire Weekend – Horchata”

  1. Chris Boeckmann: In twenty years, when Ezra Koenig has scored a teaching position at the English dept of, like, Hampshire College, I hope one of his students calls him out on these terrible lyrics and then some other potheads in the back join in: “Like, yeah, man, why can’t Avey Tare teach us?”

    This is exactly how I feel about Vampire Weekend and yet I still really like them. :S

  2. Slight and disjointed and full of way too much effort to my ears, but I did at least laugh on first listen at the chutzpah of following up an LPs worth of *Graceland* retreads (albeit, niftily pleasant *Graceland* retreads) with a failed *Rhythm of the Saints* homage. But then I read Anthony Easton’s perfect reference to *The Lion King* — still laughing heartily at that. 3.5

  3. Folks, Vampire Weekend is just the Talking Heads of our time.

  4. Which I don’t think is anything to be mad at, if that’s the case (and you’re being serious), Jackson.

  5. They wish they were Talking Heads.

  6. I can see them being Talking Heads circa ’85 or later, actually.