Vampire Weekend Are Happy To Wait It Out
Thursday March 20, 2008 @ 05:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

Vampire Weekend

Every year, a few buzz bands spring out of nowhere with a reworked version of a familiar sound and suddenly become ubiquitous. Brooklyn, N.Y.'s Vampire Weekend are that band in 2008.

The group's self-titled debut is getting as much attention as the self-made genres that accompany it ("Upper West Side Soweto," among others), but it remains a tremendously poppy, danceable and catchy piece of indie pop. Recorded in keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij's home studio, it has echoes of Paul Simon's '70s and '80s output, but is infused with the same laissez-faire attitude as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's first album.

ChartAttack talked to frontman Ezra Koenig shortly after the record was released to international acclaim and Vampire Weekend became one of the most sought-after groups of the winter. They're at Richard's On Richards in Vancouver on March 27.

ChartAttack: You guys seemed to rise out of the blogosphere. Do you give the internet much credit for your recent ascension?
Ezra Koenig: I don't know. I think we were aware that some blogs were starting to write about us. But, at the same time, a lot of traditional media wrote about us, too. It didn't really feel like it was like a blog thing versus any other thing.

Are you surprised by how much attention Vampire Weekend have received since the LP was released?
It's been surprising, I guess, especially to me. It seemed like the album, we recorded it so long ago, and it had been available on the internet to download for so long that it almost seemed strange to me that people would still find the actual release date a big deal. I guess for some people, it is.

The songs have been around for a while. Are you still happy playing the material after all this time?
We're definitely happy about it, definitely happy with how the record turned out. But I think now that it's out and now that we've been playing those songs so long, we're definitely getting excited to get a chance to record again.

Have you written a lot of new material?
We have a bunch of things that we're starting to flesh out.

It'll probably be a long time before those see the light of day, given that your record is just out now, though, right?
Well, we're thinking about that. We're thinking about when is the soonest we could release it, and I feel like we could probably record this summer, or at least work on them in the summer. We could probably get it out sometime next year — exactly when next year is hard to say, but I think as long as we can just start working on them, we'll keep our sanity.

Do the songs you've been working on sound the same or do they move in another direction?
It's definitely different. It's going to be different. It's only a few songs, and I'm sure we'll write a whole lot more. But it's definitely still pop songs, so it's not drastically different in that sense. But in terms of influence, I'm listening to different music. I think having played the music on the first album so much, and even having listened to so much different music since then, it's not like the things that we like now are going to disappear. The changes will be gradual and may have more to do with tone and production than influence, because it's hard to escape your influences.

You guys wrote a bunch of joke genres on your website and the media picked up on them pretty quickly. Where a lot of bands would run from that, you guys sort of embraced the gentrification.
I think we just liked the idea of making up genres, and I think after having a song called "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" and kind of thinking of other phrases that could go together that way, I mean, stuff like that, especially when you're talking about places, you might have a very specific feeling about what a place represents that other people don't have. So I think one problem is when you describe yourself, some people might take a totally different meaning from it, and I think that's the case with things like that. But for us as a band, I think it's always going to be part of the way we communicate, is to do things like that. When you talk about music with the people you work with, you kind of have to make up words and phrases so you can pick out a language you can communicate with, kind of like a shared goal of the kind of feeling you're trying to get across.

How did you guys start the band?
We were all friends. We'd worked on other projects before. When we started the band, we were all pretty aware of the music we liked. Our drummer, actually, had never really played drums in a band before. He's actually a really great guitarist. But we asked if he could play drums because we didn't have anybody else who could. He kind of developed his own style, as someone who hadn't really dealt with the instrument. In terms of the music, having played in non-rock groups, we were into the idea of having a rock band with instruments and approach it in our own way, and at least have a kind of subtlety so we didn't feel like we were doing a rock band in a cliched way.

Talk a little bit about how you ended up on XL.
They just got in touch with us. They heard our 10-song, unmastered album and had seen our show. Obviously we talked to a bunch of labels, but XL was always a label that we said, way before anybody had heard of our band, when we would just daydream about the kind of label we'd like to sign to, we'd say XL. So it was pretty amazing when they actually got in touch with us.

From start to finish, how long did it take to assemble the record?
The bulk of it took about a year because we were graduated from college, working, getting really busy and trying to find time here and there to do things. And then, when we were really finishing it up to make it an official release, we decided to record a couple more songs because we had new songs since then that we thought could fit on an album. From beginning to end, it was about a year-and-a-half of recording, very piecemeal, because we didn't have time to be in the studio. We didn't do it in a studio, actually. It was produced by Rostam, and we did it in his apartment and wherever we could.

Have you thought about going a different route for the production on your next album?
We've been talking about that. The idea of working with other producers is interesting, but, at the same time, I think Rostam can produce just as well as any big name producer. We talked to some other bands who said you can get hooked up with a big producer and go work at their house for three weeks and just bang out your whole album. But for our band, that would be pretty detrimental because I think you need to take your time. You can't just go into some other environment and force yourself to do things. You need lots of time to listen back and come up with ideas. I'd like to do it ourselves. We can rent studio space, which is something we didn't really do last time. I think it's important to record in different places, but also not to be surrounded by people who stress you out, and that's what's good about only having a producer in the band. You can only have the band there.

—Noah Love