.Dear Mark

Stop worrying about the Vampire Weekend record and just give in. That’s the great thing about records—you can love them hella hard for a week or two and then abandon them entirely with no guilt. I was lucky enough to hear it before the hype kicked in, so my view was pure and untainted, which is an enormous asset. I loved it immediately and unabashedly; it’s so catchy and precocious and instantly attractive. And yet, I’ll freely admit that after just a month I hardly listen to the thing anymore. It lasted for a couple weeks at best, a red hot love affair that died in the best possible way—with no strings attached. Come to think of it, if you’ve been hearing about them in as many places as they’ve been talked about, it might be too late for you at this point. Now it’s like Vampire Weekend is the town floozy that’s seduced and slept with everyone else already. There’s no mystery involved, they’ve got some conspicuous stains on their clothes, and their perky cuteness comes off as a pitiful faux-twee attempt to convert yet another into their bedpost victories.
Sometimes I really hate the new media and its hyper-advanced condition of propping up and knocking down, don’t you?
That said, “A-Punk” and “M79” were the wrong songs to play on Saturday Night Live. For all of their varied influences, “A-Punk” always sounds like Operation Ivy’s “Artificial Life” to me, and as for “M79″—it’s pretty impressive that they found players to manage the hyperfast bridge, but the whole thing just screams out “Look, we’ve got a string quartet playing with us!”
It’s cool on the record, but it’s convoluted and awkward in person: