#drunk rock

Rhymes with Puck by Hgih Heels Lo Fi

WJHU's DRUNK ROCK presents: DRUNK ROCK "WHITE LIGHT/WHITE DOG", which is when emily gets her ass around to reviewing something that's still sort of current, as opposed to ancient shit that nobody cares about except when they're loaded. Enjoy.

Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City

Lyrically, Ezra Koenig is at his best when he’s judging people. This album has some of that, and it doesn’t disappoint when it appears (“And punks who would laugh when they saw us together/ but they didn’t know how to dress for the weather”), but for the most part, it’s surprisingly absent.  What we get instead is a whole lot of existential soul-searching and, relatedly, sort of a creeping feeling that maybe—just maybe—Ezra got his heart broken sometime between Contra and now. It’s sort of like finding out one of the mascots at Disney World is actually an 85-year-old alcoholic or discovering that your favorite baseball MVP used uppers or bennies or whatever it is that people get upset about (I don’t watch sports). In past albums, he’s given the impression he spends most of his time either avoiding women or accusing them of being Nicaraguan guerillas…That’s the Ezra we know and love. Now we get the sort-of-regretful “Everlasting Arms”, the sort-of-fed-up “Hannah Hunt”, the unconvincingly-named “Worship You”.  I don’t know about you, but even if the songs themselves are sort of endearing and still-catchy, I’d prefer to continue believing that Ezra is some kind of human experiment to create a living, breathing human based on Evelyn Waugh characters, engineered by the Ivy League. Tell me more about your favorite seersucker bowtie, Ezra! Or where in the city to pick up some deadstock 1900s throw pillows. Everybody I know just goes and listens to The National when they’re having real feelings, anyway.

  But in terms of Vampire Weekend’s other trademark moves, Modern Vampires of the City is pretty much in line with the band’s preceding albums.  You get all the preppy-chic name-drops you’d expect (Kennedys; Tarrytown and Rye), plus a lot of insanely obscure other references that are (presumably) meant to show you just how much of life you’ll just never understand because you didn’t go to Columbia. The Paul Simon influence is still very much alive and kicking, with some fun bongo accents, but so, too (unfortunately) is the predilection for auto-tune that VW seems to synonymize with “progress”. The digitized aspects of the album are definitely dialed up—single “Diane Young” is a good example of what I mean, even if it isn’t a good example of a song.

  One of my favorite moments comes after one of the album’s two weird soliloquys—in the unfortunately-named “Finger Back”. “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die” recalls the delicious hooks (maybe something from “Walcott”?) of earlier albums. Considering that the rest of the song is a total mess, I’d say this is important. For reasons. I do love the part in the spoken-word bit about “averting her eyes to the laminated poster of the dome of the rock”, because hello, that’s every Falafel shop on planet earth in one sentence, right there.

  The most interesting song to talk about on the album has got to be “Step”, which I will address in typical Drunk Rock fashion by not talking about it.

  My least favorite song on the album is the penultimate “Hudson”, because it’s so incredibly dirgey—which, granted, could be part of the point considering the “wrap me in the flag” reference to military burials, but this is just one of those situations where being clever doesn’t make for good music—a place that, I sincerely hope, Vampire Weekend doesn’t fall into later on. Talking about this song with sometimes-contributor, always-commenter Richard, I was promptly informed that I am dead wrong and “Hudson” is actually the best song on the album. I credit this (mistaken) opinion with the fact that our good buddy has been down with the flu recently and probably was thus incapable of enjoying any music paced quicker than whale calls. IMO, the best track is the worst named, “Everlasting Arms”.  As usual, Richard and I are in diametric opposition.

  HOWEVER. I still give this album a solid rating—it’s a little more “down” than I like my VW to be, considering I still use “White Sky” as coffee substitute in the morning, but I’m stamping Modern Vampires of the City with “Good But Not Quite As Good As Contra”, a rating that I’m coming to find that absolutely nobody understands because I’m apparently the only person on planet earth who enjoyed Contra more than Self-Titled. Whatever.

  Final thoughts: We’ve all already independently acknowledged how weird it is to include the word “Vampires” in the album title, right? So we don’t have to talk about it? Okay, great. Second: as an avid Vampire Weekender, I’m also realizing how many times you can listen to something and still think that RapGenius’ lyricists were listening to an entirely different song. I wish that I, too, were paid to make up inane shit about popular music and embed Talking Heads videos and reaction gifs into everything…but alas, I’m just doing this for free.

Drinking game: Drink every time a religious reference is made over the course of this album. Feel free to stretch non-religious lyrics as far as you like to make them religious (that’s what the analysts at RapGenius are already doing, anyway). Anyone still alive when the album is over is now the new head of your Vampire Weekend suicide cult.

I originally thought the chorus was saying “We workshopped you”, which I thought was a) more interesting, b) more prep-school-plight-y, and c) more hilarious in conjunction with the melodramatic line “Who will guide us through the end?” that follows it. It reminded me of how class generally ran when we were studying The Catcher in the Rye back in high school. Back then it was always very clear who among us would even be capable of guiding us through the end, and it was always that one pretentious Republican asshole with the snapback. As a graduating English major, I can tell you that these things don’t really change. That guy probably has a retainer now with RapGenius.

Which, coincidentally (?) is where I’m from. So either Ezra is trying to reach me through his music, or….? Perhaps relevantly, it’s been pointed out to me on several occasions how short a drop it is from appreciating Ezra Koenig in the way I currently do to actually stalking him*. I maintain that I teeter endearingly on the edge of that chasm, but…some people are just mean.

*Footnote-in-footnote: In a recent GQ spread, Ezra wore a chambray necktie by New York menswear label Ernest Alexander (where I used to work) which was (presumably) a sample and thus I (presumably) at some point touched. This brings my count of enchanted objects to one. It’s also somewhat amusing to me that that’s the sort of thing GQ assumes Ezra Koenig should wear, because up until now I’ve never known what the fuck he was talking about when he referenced clothing in his lyrics (sweaters on the ocean floor? Is that an allegory?) and obviously I know what Ernest Alexander is. Moral of the story: I forget.

This is sort of unfair to say, actually, considering that most of my complaint with the album in general is that it’s not very peppy, and I’d probably be pretty happy with an album of 12 “Diane Young”s. The wordplay, too, is sort of endearing, if a little on-the-nose.

Tomorrow’s election day, and I have one thing to say to you: “Obama, I wanna go surfing.”

Alright, alright. That’s not actually what surf-rock[1] band The Drums are saying in their song “Let’s Go Surfing”, but it pretty much sounds like it, and I needed some way to relate this article to Election Day, and I often find myself fitfully musing about what if that really was what they were saying in the song, and how super awesome that would be. “Obama/I wanna go surfing/Obama/I don’t care about nothing.” Invariably this train of thought leads me to wonder if Mister Prez really does know how to surf—he grew up in Hawaii, after all—and, what do you think, guys, does he wear boardshorts or what? One of those wetsuit dealies? I don’t actually know anything about surfing, but I do know that Obama is the hippest president of all time[2] and that if anybody was gonna fill out a pair of board shorts like a boss, it’d be him. Dude’s pretty buff, even if his hair is graying at an alarming rate that makes me question the profundity of modern science. I mean, if the White House doesn’t have the most up-to-date defenses against aging, who does? Amirite?

Anyway, tomorrow, when you’re standing at the ballot box trying to decide whether to vote for “Most Likely To Be Able To Surf” or “Most Likely To Outlaw Surfing In An Eerily ‘Footlose’-esque Piece Of Legislation”, I’ll be making some hard-hitting decisions of my own. Namely, I’ll be trying to decide for about the eight-hundredth time whether my favorite contemporary surf-rock band is The Drums, or Surfer Blood—a band who actually does make lyrical allusion to Barack Obama[3]. (Why didn’t I lead with that, then? I don’t know either.)

In the category of band names, Surfer Blood clearly wins out—naming yourself something containing the word “surf” when you’re a surf-rock band is so deliciously tongue-in-cheek that it basically makes up for the fact that their album cover featuring a hungry shark is a little too on-the-nose for my taste.  The Drums is an okay band name but it also sorta seems like the kind of band name you’d come up with in middle school, a time when one of my best band-name contenders was “The Bassments”, which, obviously, is a pun on Bass, which presumably said band would contain. Thankfully The Bassments never came to pass, and we all know that even if they had, they wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good as The Drums, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a pretty mediocre name. Thankfully, naming is a pretty irrelevant category for considering the merits of a band.[4]

Lyrically, we start to run into some problems right off the bat. The Drums have a really nice way of not overcomplicating things: “The days go by/and I never needed you” pretty much gets straight to the damn point, which I respect. And you’ve got to love a band that has a song whose chorus goes “I want to buy you something/But I don’t have any money/No I don’t have any money”. Who hasn’t been there? I pretty much live there. These guys aren’t T.S. fucking Eliot, that much is clear, but they seem pretty comfortable doing what they’re doing, and they’re catchy as hell, and sometimes it’s best just to say what you mean. Not always, obviously, but sometimes.

But then again, sometimes obscurity is its own reward. In that corner, we’ve got Surfer Blood. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know what a “Catholic Pagan” or “Adolescent sour mash”[5] is, but hey, you do you, SB. At the other extreme, one does sorta get the sense that they get sick of trying to rhyme sometimes and just shrug. “I have to rhyme with ‘into’ again? Can we just—oh, wait, how about ‘aaah-aah, oooh-ooh’?”[6] Yeah, that works, guys. That works. But neither of these extremes makes them unrelatable: don’t we all just wish we “knew everything it takes to get along”? I mean, we all went to middle school and felt like thoroughly dysfunctional organisms. I distinctly remember thinking that there had to be some sort of standard-issue First Aid Kit-type set of tools that everyone else in my class had been given in order to function properly. To be fair, back then “everything it takes to get along” probably consisted of a Hollister hoodie and some Pumas, but let’s not pretend that concept is any less mystifying now than it was then.[7]

And then there’s the final category: presence of a song about Twin Peaks. In this category, Surfer Blood wipes the floor with The Drums like Norma mopping up after a long day at the Double R Diner[8]…largely because, well, Surfer Blood has a song about Twin Peaks and The Drums don’t. Is this a fair criteria on which to judge a band? Probably not. Do I care? Definitely not. Am I going to systematically list the top 5 Musical References To Twin Peaks right here, right now? Well, now that you mention it, yes.:

1.     Surfer Blood’s “Twin Peaks”, obviously. It doesn’t actually reference TP that much lyrically, aside from saying “Twin Peaks and David Lynch” every so often, but it’s such a good college-life song: hanging out on the couch, talking about Twin Peaks, trying to decide how much trouble you’re putting yourself in if you make a move on the object or your affections, self-loathing in response to the outcome of that decision (regardless of which way you went), and, of course, “making fun at the video store”. If this is the wrong way to spend Freshman year, I don’t wanna be right[9]. Did I mention it’s catchy? It’s so damn catchy.

2.     McChris (or is it MC Chris?)’s “Twin Peaks” which not only is just a big ol’ David Lynch-punning romp lyrically, but also makes use of the actual TP theme song. Bonus points for the Ghost Busters reference, shortly followed by “That’s right, I put a Ghost Busters reference in a song about Twin Peaks! Everybody’s happy!” It’s a pretty stupid song, but I like that sort of thing.

3.     Twin Peaks’ “The Black Lodge”. Not sure if any of the actual song is about Twin Peaks, but the opening is part of Log Lady’s monologue, and Log Lady is obviously the coolest character in that show. Plus the owls hooting in the background[10].

4.     A tie: either Fieldmouse’s “Falling (Twin Peaks Theme)” or She’s So Rad’s “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart (Twin Peaks Cover)”, both of which, aside from being kinda mellow and expected, are actually pretty good tunes when just playing in the background somewhere. In other news, does anybody know of any “An Invitation To Love”-inspired tracks? Because that would be some next-level shit, that right there.

5.     LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down (With Twin Peaks Theme Intro)”. What does this have to do with Twin Peaks, really? Not much. But have you heard the live recordings from the last LCD Soundsystem show at MSG? Fuckin’ heartbreaking. Especially this track, for obvious reasons. If you’re honestly going to ask me why this made the list, you either a) have no soul or b) don’t know about the clause in my contract with WJHU that requires me to mention LCD Soundsystem at least once per article.

Uh. Wow. Aren’t we glad that just happened?

So, er, like I was saying. Don’t forget to vote.

[1] In iTunes, The Drums are listed as an Electronica band, but this strikes me as obviously untrue. In fact, just the other day, when describing another band as being “surf-rock”, the friend I was describing to said, “Like The Drums?” to which I enthusiastically replied, “YEAH!” even though the band in question was almost wholly (but not quite, Douglas Adams fans) unlike The Drums. I was just so excited that my friend was using The Drums as a cultural referencepoint that I got carried away with myself. (But, much like Sam in Garden State, I went back afterwards and admitted that what I said was basically untrue.)

[2] Or at least since Taft.

[3] “Barack Hussein Obama would have a field day/If he knew at all” (Catholic Pagans)

[4] Didn’t stop me, though.

[5] Points for using the phrase “sour mash” in a song, though.

[6] “Come pick me up in the morning/And we can find a hole to crawl into/We’re still pretending to be lightweights/My arms and legs, they will grow soft, aaah-aah, oooh-ooh” You’ve gotta hand it to those guys.

[7] Seriously, what was it about Hollister hoodies?

[8] Nobody likes this joke. Nobody.

[9] It’s also probably important to mention two other lyrics in the song, “Your sexual advances/Are unconvincing and untrue”, and “Your humor’s getting sour, too”, for their resounding truthiness. In the scheme of the aforementioned Freshman year, didn’t everybody have that one romance that was almost wholly unromantic to the point of just being vaguely insulting? Didn’t everyone also have that one love interest who was originally into weird shit in a way that made them seem really intriguing and complex but ended up just being, like, sorta alarming? No? Not everybody? Just me? Okay, then.