WVAU Top Music 2013: #4

General Manager

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#4 ALBUM:

 

Vampire Weekend, Modern Vampires of the City

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Vampire Weekend’s third album was highly anticipated, coming after their breakthrough eponymous debut and their strong sophomore outing with Contra. Modern Vampires of the City took on somewhat more serious themes than their previous two albums. Its cover, showing a sprawling metropolis doused with fog, sets the tone. They took on an issue as old as humanity in “Ya Hey,” which focuses on religion and where the truth about god and faith actually lie. Their conclusion? Gibberish and a blur of sounds, as if to say, “We don’t know.” Vampire Weekend shows simultaneously that they have not lost the indie pop sensibility which made them alternative darlings. The first half of the album, with cuts such as “Step,” “Diane Young,” and “Don’t Lie,” will run through your head with its ear-worm melodies and rhythms for weeks. Modern Vampires of the City earned Vampire Weekend a Grammy nomination and many new fans by showcasing some of the best songwriting and melodies of the year, as brought to you by Ezra Koenig.
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By Tim Neil

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#4 SONG:

 

My Bloody Valentine, “Only Tomorrow”

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Loveless was the shoegaze equivalent of Impressionism, mbv was Cubism, and “Only Tomorrow‰” fills gap between the two, marking itself as both the most interesting track on My Bloody Valentine‰’s first release in over 21 years and a new dimension for the shoegaze genre. Musically, the track is unmistakably the result of Kevin Shields‰’ monomaniac knack for making electric guitars sound anything but. The guitar work on “Only Tomorrow‰” builds its foundation on a relatively traditional melodic phrasing, but buries it in blankets of dense walls of timbre. A Sonic Youth-esque third-bridge snarls and scratches, so harsh that it acts more percussive than melodic. Texturally, the song is soft and sharp, dense and thin, infinite and minimal, all depending on which voices you‰’re focusing on.

As the song progresses, we get a real glimpse at Shields‰’ new brainchild: manipulating voices in a near extra-dimensional way. The guitars stutter and flicker like someone sticking their fingers in a ceiling fan, falling out of time and eventually righting themselves. Belinda Butcher‰’s vocals start as her usual airy whisper before their pitch accelerates and wavers until they reach a heavenly atmospheric tone. Lyrically, the band paints with the same dreamy, surreal abstractions that make up the album‰’s song titles. While a great album, it‰’s tough to imagine that mbv will become the genre-defining textbook that Loveless is, but if every song was as good as “Only Tomorrow,‰” it might stand a chance.
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By Cameron Stewart