In the beginning, Vampire Weekend songs always played out from a healthy distance. Frontman Ezra Koenig tended to adopt a cinematic lens to the stories and scenes that populated the music of their self-titled debut record. He sung in second person – a lot – and in first person, too. The words “you” and “I” would often pop up in the same sentence – like on ‘Campus’: “In the afternoon, you’re out on the stone and grass / and I’m sleeping on the balcony after class” – but the interaction between the two people was always removed and never intimate. That is, until the song ‘Taxi Cab’ on Contra, the band’s 2010 sophomore LP, is imbued with connection when Koenig notices how “you were standing there so close to me” atop a bed of strings, arpeggiated piano and a glacial, digital drum sequence. These moments of sincerity differentiate Contra from their astonishingly impressive debut, Vampire Weekend, despite the stylistic similarities shared between the two projects. Contra has the same observational, multicultural beating heart as Vampire Weekend, but it is more musically adventurous and emotionally honest. As a result, Contra still stands as a worthy, beautiful, distinct release twelve years later.

Curiously, time has rendered Contra the ‘forgotten’ album in Vampire Weekend’s discography, something Koenig himself has publicly noted. Vampire Weekend remains their most enduringly popular project, the artful Modern Vampires of the City is widely regarded as their best, while the recent Father of the Bride was their major label debut and received significant Grammy recognition. Meanwhile, current streaming numbers see Contra languishing behind its siblings. I doubt that many pundits would have predicted this to be the case – Contra debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and enjoyed a warm critical reception. Yet there is a stark contrast between the universal coverage of the album in the winter of 2010 and the relative lack of retrospective appraisal in recent years. Contra is absolutely a ‘weirder’ record than the band’s debut, which might account for this obscurity, but it is also more energetic and more emotional. Considering how genuinely wild Contra is for a Billboard number one album, it is puzzling and a little unfortunate that the record is rarely a talking point.

Contra is fundamentally tied to Vampire Weekend, an album that was a cultural phenomenon due to its intellectual, referential writing and brazen Afropop influence. The band favoured bright guitar tones and unconventional rhythms, inspiring as many adoring fans as it did detractors, who (not unfairly) cited cultural appropriation. However, despite the groundswell of controversy the album generated, it remains one of the finest indie-pop records in recent memory and crystallised Vampire Weekend’s defining sound. I mention this because the spectre of their debut looms large over Contra. It is deliberately innovative and melodic like Vampire Weekend yet even more diverse: indie-rock that runs the gamut from their beloved Afropop to reggaetón, bachata, soukous, dancehall and punk.

Genre-hopping aside, Vampire Weekend are still transparent in their desire to make catchy, sublime pop music on Contra. By this standard, the album is a raging success. Opener ‘Horchata’ is gorgeous to the point of provocation – Koenig’s dynamic melody is proudly paired with sunny, plinking marimba, a slice of Caribbean calypso that shows the band have no intention of abandoning their divisive sound. ‘White Sky’ is breezy and joyful synth-pop set to a skipping tempo, and finds Koenig giving in to an elastic, ecstatic holler. ‘Holiday’ and ‘Cousins’ are tight, frantic ska-punk rockers in the same mould as their early world-conquering single ‘A-Punk’, while ‘Giving Up The Gun’ has been described as the band’s most polished song yet. The song is defiantly sentimental, unusual for a band that tend to rely on wit and creativity, and legitimately rousing when a four-to-the-floor drum pulse is introduced at the halfway point.

Paul Lester, interviewing Vampire Weekend in the leadup to the release of Contra, made a fantastically relevant point about the band’s intentions: “The default position of rock music is the easily struck pseudo-revolutionary posture. For Vampire Weekend, life is a little more complex than that. They have called their second album Contra, as a gently mocking rebuke to those who might want to adopt a simpler us-versus-them pose.” Once you accept the inescapable interconnectedness of the world, you can then explore it with wide-eyed curiosity, something Vampire Weekend have been doing since the beginning. On their debut album, Koenig wrote feverishly about Cape Cod, Lil Jon, the Khyber Pass, Ivy League campuses, architecture, Buddhism, grammar, and wondered how it all fit together. On Contra, the band’s fascination with complexity and paradox leads them to more defined questions of authenticity and origin.

On no song is this more apparent than the percussive, autotuned ‘California English’, the first of two show-stopping Contra highlights. The track, while superficially described as a “love letter to California” by Koenig, closely examines how people can rely on products and symbols to feel a sense of status. The TV image of sunny, perfect California is traced back to a “Saudi satellite dish” and rings hollow when Koenig actually observes Angeleans “shivering in little undershirts”. He notices the items they choose to place value in – “sweet carob rice cakes”, “fake Philly cheesesteaks” and Tom’s natural toothpaste – and probes the authenticity of that kind of identity: “Because if that Tom’s don’t work, if it just makes you worse / would you lose all of your faith in the good Earth?” It is a heartfelt, hopeful question, one that underscores Vampire Weekend’s desire on Contra to write with humanity and emotion.

There are countless examples of brilliant writing on the album where Vampire Weekend’s pathos is dialled right up. ‘Giving Up The Gun’ radiates with empathy in watching someone prepare for death from afar: “Your sword’s grown old and rusty… you’re right back where you started from / I see it in your eyes / that now you’re giving up the gun.” ‘Horchata’ meditates on coming to terms with loss – “Years go by and hearts start to harden” – and centres around an arresting, resonant realisation: “Here comes a feeling you thought you’d forgotten.” Album closer ‘I Think Ur A Contra’, which plays out like an atmospheric, ambient coda in 6/8, takes an oblique look into constructed binaries and the way they prevent us from approaching situations with intimacy. In the end, Koenig’s resolution is definitive – “Never pick sides, never choose between two / well, I just wanted you” – a rare plea for commitment from a band that tend to accept the flux of all things. On the breathless ‘Cousins’, razor-sharp lines like “when your birthright is interest, you could just accrue it all” address the idea that a person’s origin can lock them into patterns. A sobering thought, but the band respond with a wink – “You could turn your back on the bitter world” – and a hilarious Christmas bell breakdown.

What becomes clear out of all of this is that Contra is, still to this day, an ambitious, important album for the band. It is also home to potentially the finest song they have yet created, 'Diplomat's Son'. The track is a Vampire Weekend oddity: lengthy and meandering at a six minute runtime, with synthetic percussion and a prominent M.I.A. sample. It is sonically striking - dancehall updated for the digital age - and a perfect exercise in still-life songwriting. Koenig wrings the imagery before him - "the moon [glowing] yellow in the riptide", "the light of TVs buzzing in the house", "your two shoes sitting in the bathtub" - for every ounce of hopeful romance it contains. In this sense, 'Diplomat's Son' is a truly seminal moment for the band. No longer are Vampire Weekend relying on smarts to 'wow' listeners; here they are shooting for pure emotional resonance. Keyboardist/producer Rostam Batmanglij even appears for a rare vocal appearance to proclaim that he "can't go back to how it felt before," perhaps reflecting a more general sentiment about the band's progression on Contra. The song races to its conclusion before it is derailed by a string-adorned, 8-bit reggae breakdown that opens into a final passage of pristine, cinematic intensity: "In the dark, when the wind comes racing off the river / There's a car, all black with diplomatic plates." Still observant, like the band always had been, but this time heavy on the beauty.

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Sam Gollings

22 November 2023