Word: albums
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These imperfections only serve to reinforce what is clear even in the album’s better moments: Vampire Weekend are not a “great” band. “Contra” is overall a decent album, and finds just the right balance of advancing and holding ground to prevent a sophomore slump. This pragmatism and the group’s talents have seen them achieve considerable success. Just don’t expect them to ascend to anything more remarkable...
...most radical change on the album is its lead single, the effervescent “Cousins.” Racing along like “A-Punk” on speed, it’s an unusually stimulating highlight. The way Koenig spits out convoluted lyrics like “Dad was a risk taker / His was a shoemaker / You greatest hits 2006 little list-maker” is admirable given how little time each verse allots...
Sadly, the album contains a few regrettable missteps. “Holiday” features an appalling non sequitur of a bridge, out of nowhere introducing the story of a girl protesting against the Iraq War by becoming a vegetarian into a song that seemed to be about vacations. There is no real point to the political sidestep, and it sits very awkwardly with the song and the album as a whole. On “California English” the group for some reason chooses to auto-tune Koenig’s voice, with terrible results. Closer...
...comes as a shock that on his newest album, “Rebirth,” Wayne leaves rap music behind altogether in favor of an as-yet uncharted genre: rock. In this latest effort, Wayne abandons rap’s sampled beats for a bass, drum set, and electric guitar. Power ballads of unrequited love replace tales of street violence and self-promotion, and the dissing and calling out of other rappers is tossed out in favor of punk-inspired castigation of society and nameless enemies. This bold step, however admirable it might be in theory, comes nowhere near...
...Ground Zero” seems to prove, then, that there is some room for success in Wayne’s conception of a rock album. Indeed, the problem with “Rebirth” is not that a rock album was a bad idea, though it was ambitious and risky. Rather, this record is such a failure because Wayne is almost completely incapable of executing what might have been an interesting experiment...