Retroversy

It’s not often that you come experience a truly new and unique sensation. Innovation often emerges from creative combination and manipulation of a set, but ultimately limited, number of building blocks — flavours, colours, tropes and sounds. The distinctive sound of Vampire Weekend’s 2013 album Modern Vampires of the City, one of my all-time favourite records, is a great example of this kind of innovation, boasting a production style I can only describe as “akin to a lovingly brewed cup of coffee.” With its deep, soulful and nostalgic basses, loud and vibrant drums and sparse instrumentation, it is deeply intense in aroma yet methodical and restrained, warm and mature, crafted with love and fragrant with passion, but simple in its execution. Like coffee, the songs on Modern Vampires of the City have “hints” of harpsichord and “aftertastes” of slide guitar, musical notes used as flavour notes to bolster the strength of a core ingredient that tastes exactly like its rich, but troubled history. It’s coffee treated the way only someone who is really into coffee can treat coffee, but in the end, it’s still just that. Coffee.

The band’s newest single, “Capricorn”, initially continues in a similar vein — same barista, different brew — but as the song builds to its second chorus, something changes. Very suddenly. Very jarringly. In an instant, the meticulous, quaint arrangement unravels, and what remains can really only be adequately described as a Sound. A humble indefinite pronoun is all that can truly convey what this Sound is, as it is just that — a Sound; a Sound that eschews complicated analogies and conventional epithets alike; a Sound that exists outside of any of the paradigms Vampire Weekend have tapped into in the past. Is it a guitar? A synthesizer? A violin? A buzzsaw? Pure, unfiltered white noise? A split second is all it takes from the song’s sound — tangible, comprehensible, describable — to become a Sound, intangible, incomprehensible, indescribable. Hearing it feels like catching a brief glimpse of a colour that doesn’t exist yet, like letting the endless eldritch possibilities of a world hitherto unknown wash over you. H.P. Lovecraft would be proud. And terrified.