Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Vampire Weekend
“Their music isn’t revolutionary,” says my friend of Vampire Weekend, “but it’s light and silly, and it makes me smile listening to little blips of it.” There is an impressive shock wave of fan-driven hype surrounding this Manhattan band, formed in 2006 by four students at Columbia University. Much of the hype was generated by Internet downloads and live gigs, and all of it was cooking well in advance of the release of their self-titled CD earlier this year. The music press has called their sound Afro/preppy/new wave. Vampire Weekend denies the preppy part of that tag, but for the record, the band modeled Perry Ellis and Ralph Lauren apparel for their spread in Spin magazine.
Vampire Weekend is a second-generation’s interpretation of the bands that first made an industry of world music. Think Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel, minus the save-the-world rock politics of the ’80s. In its place there is a warped kind of irreverence: “Can you stay up/ To see the dawn/ In the colors/ Of Benetton?”
Even with the inclusion of islander and Afro beats, Vampire Weekend’s music is sensually spare and pop-art simplistic. I’m reminded a bit of a William Eggleston photograph. He made sport of memorializing the everyday kind of middle-class things that go ignored. That’s Vampire Weekend, a collective focus on ordinary world-beat licks and old-pop hooks and riffs from the everyday world. The result is a mashup of the obvious and the simple, a music that sounds as if it may have sprung from some indigenous culture, blended with a strange Cape Cod sensibility. When held up to the light of public scrutiny, Vampire Weekend, like Eggleston, has proven that the ordinary can be funny and entertaining. It was a clever gamble, and it will be interesting to see how long it plays out.
VAMPIRE WEEKEND, The Casbah, Wednesday, March 19, 8:30 p.m. 619-232-4355. Sold out.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Vampire Weekend
Vampire Weekend
“Their music isn’t revolutionary,” says my friend of Vampire Weekend, “but it’s light and silly, and it makes me smile listening to little blips of it.” There is an impressive shock wave of fan-driven hype surrounding this Manhattan band, formed in 2006 by four students at Columbia University. Much of the hype was generated by Internet downloads and live gigs, and all of it was cooking well in advance of the release of their self-titled CD earlier this year. The music press has called their sound Afro/preppy/new wave. Vampire Weekend denies the preppy part of that tag, but for the record, the band modeled Perry Ellis and Ralph Lauren apparel for their spread in Spin magazine.
Vampire Weekend is a second-generation’s interpretation of the bands that first made an industry of world music. Think Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel, minus the save-the-world rock politics of the ’80s. In its place there is a warped kind of irreverence: “Can you stay up/ To see the dawn/ In the colors/ Of Benetton?”
Even with the inclusion of islander and Afro beats, Vampire Weekend’s music is sensually spare and pop-art simplistic. I’m reminded a bit of a William Eggleston photograph. He made sport of memorializing the everyday kind of middle-class things that go ignored. That’s Vampire Weekend, a collective focus on ordinary world-beat licks and old-pop hooks and riffs from the everyday world. The result is a mashup of the obvious and the simple, a music that sounds as if it may have sprung from some indigenous culture, blended with a strange Cape Cod sensibility. When held up to the light of public scrutiny, Vampire Weekend, like Eggleston, has proven that the ordinary can be funny and entertaining. It was a clever gamble, and it will be interesting to see how long it plays out.
VAMPIRE WEEKEND, The Casbah, Wednesday, March 19, 8:30 p.m. 619-232-4355. Sold out.
Comments