Song 3: Vampire Weekend – California English
About a minute into California English there’s the strangest musical coupling you’ll hear this year, as Ezra Koenig’s heavily autotuned vocal skips over a dainty classical string quartet. But the pairing is bizarre enough to work: like strawberries with balsamic vinegar (try it!), the combination succeeds because the flavours are so diametrically opposed – one the one hand there is a futuristic distortion, on the other pure and regimented orthodoxy. It’s the sound of a band pushing themselves, experimenting and working off their instincts, and that willingness to take chances is wonderfully refreshing in such concentrated blasts as here.
And then there’s the rest of the song to consider, which atones for an only averagely catchy melody with peripheral hooks that lodge into the fabric of one’s internal jukebox – the ooh-ah-oohs of the chorus’ backing vocals, the cute descending guitar line, played with Vampire Weekend’s now-trademark jaunt.
But more than anything else, California English is just gloriously brave music, a gamble paid off and an experiment succeeded. A “part 2” of this song cropped up on the b-side to Cousins, pulling and playing with boundaries even further, suggesting that perhaps the album version didn’t go as far as they would’ve liked. But nonetheless, in bang on 150 seconds, Vampire Weekend show how forward-thinking a pop song can be in 2010, and how much fun it is to taste such odd recipes.
