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VAMPIRE WEEKEND ContraXL****
The worst thing you can say about Contrais probably also one of the the best things you can say: it sounds just like Vampire Weekend. Two albums in and it’s clear that the erudite uptown New York jive merchants have cornered the market in smart indie-pop with an Afrobeat pep to its step. In fact, they’ve cornered the market so successfully that the normally inevitable parade of imitators and wannabes has not come to pass.

Of course, it’s one thing to knock off similar jaunty and precocious sounds, but it’s quite another to match Vampire Weekend in the wry lyrical reference stakes. Horchatahas not yet replaced beer as the beverage of choice in hipster salons, you know. Horchata, with Ezra Koenig knocking back a few glasses of tigernut milk and shooting the breeze, is indicative of the band’s creative approach. It’s bright, bold and perky, a quirky slice of carefree, freewheeling indie-pop, and it sets the tone for an album that draws again and again from that well.