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. One of the chief pleasures of “Vampire Weekend” is that the absorption of African influences seems relatively effortless – that it doesn’t clash with the prevailing collegiate aesthetic. There’s occasional flashes of self-consciousness – the title of “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” being the most blatant. But unlike, say, Paul Simon’s “Graceland”, which keeps getting wheeled out as a reference point, the African influence seems mainly just a sound they love to throw into the cultural mix, rather than being used to make an explicit cultural point. It’s a minor point of interpretation, I guess, but it might turn out to be a mildly significant one with regard to the way people are introduced to African and African-influenced music; not as African, just as music. And while we’re on the subject, does anyone remember The Red Guitars? I have a couple of albums at home which I can’t have played in 20 years, but I’ve a vague memory that they were doing something slightly similar, albeit in a much less graceful and artful way. Anyway, today’s record is rinsing out our heads right now. It’s called “Street Horrrsing” (nope, don’t know what it means, sorry), and it’s by a duo called Fuck Buttons, which I must admit charms me no end. Fuck Buttons appear to be associates of Mogwai, since John Cummings produced this fantastic debut album. But rather than majestically peaking post-rock, their music seems to be a kind of mellow noise; distorted drone-rock and fractious electronic ambience, with the requisite post-Boredoms addition of tribal drums. It reminds me most of the excellent Growing (who have a good new album out on Social Registry that I’ve shamefully neglected to blog about), and of Black Dice around the time of “Beaches And Canyons”, my favourite album of theirs by some distance. There’s a great sequence on “Street Horrrsing” which runs from “Ribs Out” – pounding drums, clicking bones, the odd yelp – through the clunky ritualistic fuzz-electronica of “Okay, Let’s Talk About Magic”, then climaxes with the sepulchral white noise hum of “Race You To The Bedroom”, built on vast churchy doom chords and what sounds like a indignant black metal vocalist chuntering away deep in the feedback. I guess that’s the Mogwai connection: a way of taking the basic, derided vocabulary of metal and making something avant-garde and, at times, transcendently beautiful out of it.

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. 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.