I know it’s a blogger’s imperative to write about albums several months before they’re actually released, but sometimes, it takes a little longer for me to get the hang of a record. Amusingly, I’m usually slow to like records which are immediately acclaimed elsewhere for their brilliance, accessibility and so on.

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Consequently, while every other music blogger on the planet has been extolling the virtues of Vampire Weekend for months now, it was only last week – when “Vampire Weekend” was on sale in shops, of all things – that it finally clicked with me.

Better late than never. If you’ve been suspicious of all the hype around these well-groomed Brooklynites, it might be worth, like me, having another go. I think my initial mild antipathy – stimulated, I guess, by the “Mansard Roof” single – was because they sounded roughly like something arch and post-Strokes; a little too indie and skinny-sounding for my distortion-heavy tastes. The whole Ivy League schtick was appealing, though. I’ve always been mistrustful of that British music hack tradition of fetishising working-class bands as somehow more “real”; as I’ve mentioned here before, I think it’s a pretty limiting and problematic critical approach to parse artists for ‘authenticity’, whatever that means.

Vampire Weekend, of course, seem to be pretty authentic East Coast graduates. But the self-conscious, wry focus on Cape Cod, collegiate business which fills “Vampire Weekend” is so relentless as to be hyper-real. If Whit Stillman were ever to make a film about a rock band – it’d be nice if he ever made another film full stop, actually – I imagine they’d be a lot like Vampire Weekend (sadly, Chris Eigeman must be a bit too old to play the singer now).

Anyway, this record. I could go on about the African influences and all that, but that’s been covered off pretty substantially elsewhere. What I like about “Vampire Weekend” most is the thing that initially repelled me: what I initially heard as skinniness, I know hear as great measure and lack of clutter, a sense of space. Unlike so many other bands who’ve followed in the wake of The Strokes, the playing here – like that of The Strokes – is precise and artful, rather than shambolic and meandering.

It isn’t, though, particularly uptight – in spite of all those upper-class stereotypes. A lot of the songs – but especially “Walcott”, my current favourite – are powered by a kind of prim exuberance. It isn’t the great psychedelic gust that I usually bang on about, but there is a palpable unfettered joy in this music which, when it comes packaged in button-down shirts – feels rather quaintly subversive.

And maybe there’s something about playing the album a couple of times. Because when you’ve heard these songs more than once, it’s hard to shake them out of your head. In a while, that might be more of a problem than a pleasure. But for now, it makes for a really good start to the week.