Vampire Weekend, Other Stage at Glastonbury, June 27th
Vampire Weekend proved the most exciting band of the Friday
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Monday, 30, Jun 2008 09:27
inthenews.co.uk's Lewis Bazley finds the Upper West Side Soweto foursome on top form.
Vampire Weekend have African rhythms swaying through the Other Stage field as the clouds part, instilling a summer vibe in the crowd. M79 is a Wes Anderson-tinged slice of Paul Simon storytelling while at other times it feels like you're listening to 1987, much helped by the preppy New Yorkers' attire.
Crowd-pleaser A-Punk is wondrous, getting the entire field skanking and crying "Oi!" while I Stand Corrected is a highlight, an insistent, urgent anthem that cries out for inclusion on a '2008 Festival Essentials' compilation.
It's always easy to feel cynical about a band when they're included in the type of next big thing lists that crop up towards the end of the year, but just as MGMT have proved their psych-rock is a marvellous melding of future sounds and the summer of love, while Adele and Duffy have confidently dented the charts, so has the foursome of Vampire Weekend shown that combining the Upper West Side with the Kalahari needn't be as awful as it sounds on paper.
The call and response of a Caribbean-flavoured Blake sees Ezra Koenig managing the Somerset crowd like a bespectacled auctioneer and after his modest introduction sees Walcott bounces and shimmering across the afternoon, the rain doesn't matter a bit.
Check out the video for Oxford Comma, directed by The IT Crowd's Richard Ayoade, below:
Lewis Bazley