The Daily Spin II
Vampire Weekend | Vampire Weekend
Welcome back to the Daily Spin. For the uninitiated, this is the series in which I review an album every day of 2025.
As was the case two years ago, my favorite song from each album can be found at the playlist linked here.
Album: Vampire Weekend (2008)
Artist: Vampire Weekend
Link:
It’s amazing how fresh this record still sounds, nearly seventeen years (ew!) after its release. If you had told me this was out last week, I probably would have believed you had I not heard the record a thousand times before.
That’s what the real strength of Vampire Weekend is - the sheer replayability of the record is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Even in reviewing this record, I was well into my third run of the album before I did the whole ‘wait a second’ routine and realized how long I’d been spinning this album.
It is simultaneously a strength and a pitfall - the ease of listening to these songs also makes them somewhat indistinct, especially in the middle section. It’s really nice for the streamlining of the tracks, but that sameness fails a little bit when it puts about half the record into an amorphous blob.
When it hits, though - oh my god. This record is the platonic ideal of what indie pop is and should be, and it’s obvious why this has been the standard-bearer for the genre in the years since its release. Batmanglij and Koenig are stars in their own right, keyboard and vocals that sing, arpeggios that flutter around the airy sound that prevails so consistently here.
Occasionally panned for being a little too Northeast preppy, Ivy League-educated, it’s amazing how the sound of this record bridges those gaps - yes, they’re undeniably all those things, but they wear their identity in a way that leaves it less choking than in other cases.
Rating: 9/10
Best Tracks: A-Punk, Walcott, The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance
Worst Tracks: Mansard Roof