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QUICK SPINS: Ke$ha, Vampire Weekend

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 12, 2010 7:40PM

In which we take a quick look at a few recent musical releases.

Ke$ha
Animal

2010_01_kesha.jpg By all rights, we should hate Ke$ha. She's a young wanna-be dirtbag diva, cute but trying to project an acceptable amount of off kilter anger, who carries around an abundance of hooks in her back pocket, tucked close to her American Apparel leggings and Hot Topic sneer. She rips of Uffie, shamelessly apes Avril Lavigne, and pals around with those utterly loathsome dudes from 3OH!3. Her music / image sounds like she was formed by committee,albeit by all appearances that committee seems to be constructed solely of her and her producer Dr. Luke, and is probably more a testament to her fractured assimilation of ever morphing musical trends. Despite all this we've found ourselves ravenously consuming the utterly disposable tween-tiged electro-mall-punk of Animal in huge doses over the last week or so. She soundtracks our gym workout, she peps up out walks home in the cold, and she provides ample wattage as we get ready to hit the town. Do we believe her boasts of brushing her teeth with whiskey and programming an 808? Hell no, but we're not going to deny we have an awfully good time listening to her shout about it.

Vampire Weekend
Contra

2010_01_Vampire_Weekend.jpg Do you like Paul Simon's Graceland? So does Vampire Weekend, despite their apparent discomfort at admitting it. The group rose to fame setting vapidly preppy vignettes -- whether the lyrics are a glorification or critique of that vapidity seems almost impossible to answer at this point -- against a mostly pleasant background of Eurocentric Afropop. This innocuous concoction has inspired a fevered debate over the band's authenticity, but at this point this discourse seems largely pointless since the band has achieved a comfortable level of fame no indie backlash will diminish. Contra takes the template set by the band's debut, throws a little more money for time in the studio at it, and the result is an album that shows no change in the band's sound. So what does this all mean? It means that the band isn't likely to lose any fans with Contra. It also means the naysayers will continue to pick away at Vampire Weekend for seeming to function behind a facade of safe irony. And it means that people like us, who could care less either way, won't be spinning this disc any longer now that we don't have to listen to it for this review.