Vampire Weekend Takes on Its Buzz

"He was really into rap," Koenig says. "And I've always been into rap and into making a lot of beats. So we just decided to start something, and we liked the idea of having this very easy-to-move setup. It was just a laptop, and we would rap over it. We'd had these experiences of trying to get a whole band together, and it had been a real pain in the ass, so having minimal equipment and minimal musicians was kind of nice."

Before long, the pair had cobbled together ditties such as "Interracial Dating," boosted by Mario Bros. electronics, an unlikely reference to the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden" and lines like "I airbrushed your breasts on the top of my Lexus/But it's just because I fell in love with your solar plexus." Eventually, though, Koenig realized that "playing with a laptop is kind of a pain in the ass, too. I felt like, it's nice to have a live band that can just rock out on any system. It doesn't matter if the P.A. is crappy and you're at some shitty party. And that was kind of the impetus for getting Vampire Weekend together."

Koenig already knew Batmanglij, Baio and Tomson by then, and soon the quartet developed a multi-culti hybrid that merges quasi-African guitar parts and rhythms, classically derived string arrangements and lyrics that merge pop-culture allusions with references that prove the boys paid attention in class. Take "Oxford Comma," in which Koenig sings, "Show your paintings/At the United Nations/Lil Jon, he always tells the truth."

This blend, coupled with the foursome's preppy fashion sense (Koenig wore a prim white sweater on SNL), set Vampire Weekend apart from the oodles of interchangeable bands haunting the NYC club scene, and reviewers soon began raving, albeit in a fairly incomprehensible way. After David Byrne wrote something nice about the group on his blog, scribes began reflexively comparing the musicians to the Talking Heads, whom they sound almost nothing like, when not repeatedly name-checking Paul Simon's Graceland, a 1986 Grammy-winning album that no hipster critic worth his CBGB shirt had ever admitted to admiring before. "It can be frustrating," Koenig concedes. "We keep getting asked about these people over and over again, as if we sat down and listened to their albums and took notes and made our own album. Then you almost start to feel defensive, and you get to the point where you almost want to say something bad about someone you really like."

Vampire Weekend could face a similar situation. The group's disc is an inoffensive, generally pleasant listen, with the blithely complex "M79" suggesting that there's more to these guys than a clever amalgamation of influences and some fortuitous timing. Nevertheless, the album as a whole remains far from earth-shattering, and as a result, plenty of folks who give it a spin after being inundated with raves may denounce it more severely than it deserves. There's no telling if this verdict will inspire the group to deepen and broaden its sound or bring the entire project to a screeching halt.

Not that Koenig has time to worry about either prospect. He's busy dealing with more immediate matters — like the question of whether the chances of Vampire Weekend's long-term survival will be enhanced or diminished by ten-second clips affixed to the end of MTV shows like America's Best Dance Crew and The Gauntlet III.

"There are two schools of thought on it," he says. "One school of thought is, MTV is putting some weird stuff on the air right now; do we really want to be a part of it? And the other school of thought is, there's nothing wrong with us — and if they're going to put anything on there, it might as well be Vampire Weekend."

Visit Backbeat Online for more of our interview with Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend.