Given how everyone has fixated on their Ivy League background, the sticky-floored ambience – the quintessential redbrick-ness - of ULU shouldn’t be quite right for Vampire Weekend. Surely, we should all be watching them in an immaculate marquee, in the grounds of an Oxford college, shortly before a long and intense reading party in the Cotswolds?
I’ve just been reading your comments on yesterday’s Vampire Weekend blog – thanks for those. They helped me crystallise my thoughts about that much-vaunted African influence on the album. What’s interesting, I think, is not that they draw on African sounds, but how they point up the affinities between that spindly, melodically cartwheeling guitar sound and the indie-rock tradition.
