Your little arrows of desire - I want to trace them to the source

Continuing my trip back through the 2010 album charts.

17/01/10 : Contra - Vampire Weekend

I'm pretty certain I listened to this at the time and was pretty unimpressed with the whole thing - I've certainly not listened to it in the intervening period, so it will be interesting to see what I think upon revisiting it.

Hmmm - I'm not entirely sure what I found to object to with this.  It's just not quite as catchy as their debut, but it's still nicely bouncy and there's nothing wrong with it if you like this sort of US quirky arty indie sound.  Will I be rushing back to it again before another 13 years are up?  Well no, but I still feel a bit guilty that I remembered it being terrible.

We're at #3 in the charts this week at the start of sixteen week run, after which it took a month off and then came back for a seventeen week run - but it never got any higher than this.  The rest of the top five were Florence, Paolo, Gaga and You Me At Six (another new entry) and we have one more new entry in the top ten with Delphic (#8 - and I seem to recall I quite liked this).  The next highest new entry was Esmee Denters (#48) - who I knew absolutely nothing about, but can now tell you she was a Dutch YouTuber who was one of the first artists to get over 100 million views on YouTube!

Wikipedia has some stuff on the album, most of which I'm going to gloss over except for this sentence - "the album has been characterized as pop, "eclectic, intellectual indie rock", and "diffident haute bourgeoisie synth pop"".  What a load of nonsense!  

The reason for glossing over most of it is so we can get on to the controversy and lawsuits!  The band saw the album cover photo on Flickr and paid photographer Tod Brody $5k to be allowed to use it.  However, when Ann Kirsten Kennis's (the model) daughter brought the album home, it unfortunately transpired that Tod (allegedly) didn't either take the photo or own the photo.  Oh.  So Ann sued the band for a mere $2m and then the band sued Tod for whatever damages they were going to end up paying.  At time of last update, the band had settled with Ann, but not with Tod.

There's also some interesting facts on the album title - apparently it's nothing to do with the Nicaraguan rebels, but named after the video game of the same name.  Do Vampire Weekend feel like the sort of band to name an album after a video game?  (spoiler alert - NO, they don't!).  The conspiracy theorists also note that the track "I Think Ur A Contra" includes the phrase "Complete Control", which was the title of a Clash single from their album Sandinista! (which was most definitely named after the Nicaraguans).  Hmmmm.  Whatever the politics, the critics liked the album (it's a very critic friendly album) and it did very well commercially, particularly on the other side of the Atlantic getting to #1 in the US and Canada.

"Customers also listened to" Passion Pit, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, The Vaccines and The Shins - well that's a strange mix and no mistake.  I liked this album a lot more than I was expecting too though - after all, who doesn't love a spot of "diffident haute bourgeoisie synth pop"?

10/01/10 - In which I say some surprisingly nice things
24/01/10 - Not aimed at me