Amanda Petrusich on a new album from the band, fronted by Ezra Koenig, featuring the songs “Capricorn,” “Classical,” “Gen-X Cops,” and “Mary Boone.”
The band’s second album, “Contra,” released in 2010, débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. The songs were idiosyncratic but had shockingly broad appeal. That winter, the single “Holiday,” a reggae-inflected rock track that, for better or worse, could have been airlifted from a third-wave ska compilation, appeared in two major television commercials at the same time. More albums followed—“Modern Vampires of the City,” in 2013, and “Father of the Bride,” in 2019.
“We’re all the sons and daughters / Of vampires who drained the Old World’s necks,” Koenig, a descendant of Romanian and Hungarian immigrants, sings. Koenig is a meticulous lyricist, not one of those say-any-old-thing types. He favors harsh, distinctive nouns , and he often has to do some major syllabic gymnastics to make the rhythm work, like in this part of “Ice Cream Piano”: “You talk of Serbians / Whisper Kosovar Albanians / The boy’s Romanian / Third-generation Transylvanian.
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