Humanizing The Vacuum

Ezra Koenig’s performance matched his hair: floppy and insouciant. Waving his arms, exhorting the crowd into chanting (a populist concession I hate but almost worked in this case) as if they were seriously competing with Rihanna for singles chart ubiquity, Vampire Weekend’s South Florida appearance, this time in support of Contra, benefited from major headwinds blowing in their favor: an audience that had learned every synthesized arpeggio and lyric by heart, maybe as well as the band itself. They stumbled once: on a nice-try attempt at slowing “Taxi Cab” to a crawl (taking a cue from Tracey Thorn’s cover?). The Fillmore Theater, notoriously unsympathetic to rock acts, was the ideal venue for their percolating chamber-pop; the sound was thicker, the band’s arrangements blessed with the filigrees appended by months of road work. I could hear every one of Chris Baio’s bass pokes and Koenig’s upstrokes. Rostam Batmanglij‘s keyboard ostinatos added crucial dimensionality; on a massive “Diplomat’s Son,” and a version of “Horchata” played as a dusky ballad, Batmanglij and Koenig existed in an aural world removed from their ostensible rhythm section. It begs the question: does Vampire Weekend have one? Not in a traditional sense. Baio and drummer Chris Tomson (a fan of rolling toms and grimaces) don’t mesh so much as embellish. It requires little imagination to conceive of an iteration of Vampire Weekend comprised solely of the Koenig-Batmanglij twosome.

As my friends know too well, I adore the idea of Vampire Weekend (their reviews are almost as fun to read as their albums are to listen to). I prefer Contra to the debut because Koenig (and in the exceptional “Diplomat’s Son,” Batmanglij) fleshes out scenarios, lyrically and vocally. Take “Horchata,” a sharper remembrance of things past than the eponymous album’s signifiers of geography and purchasing power, thanks to the way in which Koenig belts the chorus just in time for the band’s multitracked harmonies to cushion him. They’re on to something: the intersection of fashion,  homoeroticism, and memory. As fun as these tracks are, unease is part of the aftershock too; Koenig’s narrators, way over the threshold of adulthood, evaluate situations whose complexity is beyond their education. And since even their recent songs boast the airiest of textures, a lot of people distrust Vampire Weekend: they’re light, suspect, “shallow.” Saint Etienne is the only act with a similar aural and thematic stamp, and you can still write their fan club about how well it’s going for them in America. Although Contra will likely make my top five of the year, I’m unsatisfied when it ends. Gestures and outlines, not finished works. Perhaps an outside producer with veto power will do the trick.

Unfortunately I missed The Very Best’s set, but should have missed Beach House’s relentlessly not bad performance. Sweet and innocuous, they evoked melancholy instead of summoned it; you keep them on to remind you of bummers past (three very different members of my crew remarked, “They sound like Mazzy Star”). Dumb they’re not: Teen Dream‘s “Norway” was accompanied by projections of stars, as if the band acknowledged they’d stumbled onto their best hook to date, the one that could make an iPod mix beside “A-Punk” with the right remix. Thirty minutes later and the crowd started to squirm, and who can blame them? Vampire Weekend had the beats and the brains, and they’re making lots of money.

Donald Fagen’s take on critic “Sascha Frere-Jacque” is a cool dress rehearsal for a possible Steely Dan song. Frere-Jacques is besotted with a noise act called CapGras (whose rhythm section, Frere-Jacques rhapsodizes, creates a bottom  so powerful it sucks the crowd “like the viscous mouth of a giant lampray”).

I looked forward to last night’s Arctic Monkeys show, my first. Ninety minutes revealed the limitations of their chord structures as well as a bewildering fascination with stopping and starting songs (classic Pretenders were the only band capable of doing so with some variety, as far as I know). The tracks from last year’s Humbug gained nothing from several months of touring. Jamie Cook unspooled guitar lines that refused to turn into hooks or melodies, and Alex Turner’s barking didn’t help (they should have titled the album Humdrum); “My Propellor” and “Pretty Visitors” stayed as ungainly as their titles. The highlight was and remains “Cornerstone,” their best ballad, here played and sung with delicacy and wit.

On the other hand, the Monkeys clearly love Favourite Worst Nightmare, one of those happy sequels that refines and reshapes a beloved debut. The acoustics at the Fillmore Theater did many favors for “Do Me a Favour”‘s spacey, extended groove, while a blistering “Brianstorm” actually topped “I Bet You Good on the Dancefloor” for intensity. Playing “Fluorescent Adolescent” in a different key and at a slower tempo diluted the impact of Turner’s way with a polysyllable, though, but the band was clearly touched when the audience chanted back every verse. Win some, lose some. Which sums up my impressions of the Monkeys. The English press’ hyperbolic ministrations complicate attempts to judge young bands on their merits. The Monkeys’ guitar-bass-drums approach is so basic that it’s hard to imagine Humbug as anything other than a misfire. But I can also imagine Alex Turner turning into a Jarvis Cocker type, dependent on his bandmates’ ability to find backdrops commensurate with his literary curlicues (the fate of Dramarama’s John Easdale also came to mind). Turner’s persona – a reluctant roué because he’s young and laddish – is the stuff of which lifetime curiosity if not devotion is made.