I’m surprised it took this long to buy this record. I got it from Scotti’s closing sale (RIP) about two years ago, but it’s been on my iPod practically since it came out. This is one of those records that I knew like the back of my hand - or so I thought. The experience of listening to it on good speakers is completely different than listening to it on cheap headphones between classes. I borrowed it from my middle school English teacher in exchange for letting him borrow my copy of Grand by Matt & Kim.
Vampire Weekend cast themselves as a Boston band, which is weird, because they're an extremely Brooklyn band. Contra sounds a lot like a Brooklyn band; a Brooklyn band specifically, not a Manhattan band like the Strokes or the Walkmen or Interpol. Of those three, they take the most from the Walkmen with their calculatedly clumsy piano playing and affection for diminished vii chords in major key songs. No, Vampire Weekend is a Brooklyn band because of their hipster melange of styles disguising an embrace of pop essentials. They wrap the aesthetics of Harvard around the sonics of an imagined Cape Town and Cambridge in order to smuggle Stockholm's pop to those of us who pretended to be too cool for it. You must remember that the Ivy League school they met at was Columbia, after all. The lyrics are pretty Brooklyn too. In between the references to prep schools, expensive vacations, and diplomatic license plates, there are also songs about quitting the scene, looking down on the squares who work downtown, and being barely able to pay rent. The most Brooklyn thing about Vampire Weekend is the blatant lie during their earlier years that they'd never heard Graceland.
Contra opens with non-sequitur lyrics that rival "Fly" by Sugar Ray in their breathless nonsensicality. "Horchata" is nonsense on its face, but it's nonsense about how something or someone from your past can come back and break an illusion that had built up over time. Tape-saturated marimba sits side by side with African percussion, blown-out vocal harmonies, programmed bass, and a string quartet. "White Sky" is a comparatively austere 12-8 pop song about being overwhelmed by midtown and how much the MOMA sucks. "Holiday" is the most straightforwardly indie rock song on the album, even though it has plenty of ska influence and Ezra Koenig's signature freewheeling lyrics. "California English" is an interesting experiment in auto-tuned speed singing that doesn't really land for me.
"Taxi Cab" and "Run" are kick-ass pop songs about being on either side of the class divide. I appreciate the contrast between the two. "Taxi Cab" is cool, midtempo, has an instrumental chorus with a harpsichord and strings. "Run" has more of that unquantized faux-Africana vibe to its verses, but also has a really good post-punk chorus and some interesting uses of dissonance. "Cousins" is a weird, modal, goofy pop song; I remember this one being my favorite back in the day because if I couldn't understand the lyrics on any of the songs, I could at least appreciate the high energy. "Diplomat's Son" is a weird reggae song that's probably about a homosexual encounter (but who knows, honestly). "I Think Ur A Contra" hits significantly differently after the destruction of shared reality by dedicated industrial propagandists.
You might have noticed I skipped a song on an otherwise track-by-track review. "Giving Up The Gun" is one of the great oxymorons from a deeply oxymoronic band. Almost everything is in the right key, but the bass and lead vocals sometimes feel like they're on a different chord than the synths and background vocals. Lyrics that allude to time spent in the underground rock trenches on a shimmeringly bright song that could have been on any synth-pop album since Give Up. It released alongside a stark tennis-themed music video featuring RZA, Lil Jon, and a Jonas brother. Vampire Weekend is one of a handful of "independent" bands that got to the top of the Billboard Albums chart, assisted by the label group that bought out the co-op record label that spawned Scritti Politti and the Smiths.
This is a different pressing than the one I borrowed from my English teacher in 2011. It has a neat little slip cover. The design of the interior booklet evokes blue-lined graph paper. I enjoyed this album back then, but I think I enjoy different things about it now. The thing that has changed about Contra for me over the past decade and a half isn't Contra. It's me. When I first heard Koenig reference his former love's "foot on Masada" in "Horchata", I hadn't read any Roman history. Now, I see that line as despair at the destruction of what once was, and also colored by Koenig's anti-Zionism. I feel the lamentations about class and love more acutely because I've experienced them in my own life. And I've seen the "Richard Serra skatepark" from "White Sky" with my own two eyes.
This is an album of contrasts. Hip hop. Indie rock. Afro beats. Anglo-Saxon aesthetics. Haute bourgeoise low culture. On the edge of wealth and fame, familiar, conflicted, feigning disgust for the benefit the rest of us. To quote the lyrics from "Taxi Cab", "When the taxi door was open wide/I pretended I was horrified/by the uniform and gloves outside/of the courtyard gate."