VAMPIRE WEEKEND Contra XL****
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.

However, there is some template-stretching. California Englishhas a welcome snap and a bit of a snarl to its Afrofunkpunk vocoder sounds, while Cousins is where Vampire Weekend 2.0 really come into focus. The band have always tapped into a frantic kinetic energy (see Campus, from the debut, for example) and Cousins uses this to emphasise a crisp, delightful and searing groove.

But Contradoesn't simply retrac old steps. Giving Up the Guncrackles with ambition; it's a stab at writing a song for larger rooms and bigger audiences. The idiosyncratic touches are still in check – that would be the chimes underpinning the song's nagging rhythm – but it also shows the cut of a band who now have other aims in mind. These vamps are far from dead. www.vampireweekend. com

Download tracks: Giving Up the Gun, Cousins, California English