After the name Vampire Weekend has been circulating on widely read music blogs for six months, it is up to the band in early 2008 to fulfill that promise with their eponymous debut album. The four members call their own music 'Upper West Side Soweto' and that qualification contains two musical influences. Upper West Side is the neighborhood of Manhattan where the band members are from. The same
… neighborhood where Talking Heads, The Modern Lovers and similar new wave bands took to the metropolitan air. The four members also share a love for African music. The guitar playing of singer / songwriter Ezra Koenig is occasionally reminiscent of that of the Congolese legend Franco. Vampire Weekend knows how to forge those influences into short songs with vague lyrics full of nerdy references. That's how Oxford Comma is about grammar. Maybe not quite rock 'n' roll in the old-fashioned sense of the word, but original. Vampire Weekend delivers a promising debut with this album. (PdK)more
