Vampire Weekend are love at first bite

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January is the time when the music industry rings in its new acts and slaps midprice stickers on its old. Yet several of those earmarked for success in 2008 sound not unlike what sold well in the previous 12 months: hence we’ll be offered retro-styled soul girls, northern lads making spiky observations and London trendies ready to go Skins. If, however, you want a proper sonic palate-cleanser, an aural detox, check out the latest wave of New York bands to cross the pond. These groups work, rest and play together in a Brooklyn scene that is alive with ideas and experimentation. To record buyers who have had their fill of concentrated postpunk, a tune by Dirty Projectors, Vampire Weekend or Yeasayer is as fresh as a five-a-day fruit juice downed in one.

Each comes with its own flavour, but what’s fascinating about all their rhythms is the extent to which they are influenced by afropop and other “world” music – stuff that’s usually beyond indie’s ken. Before we get carried away with their novel tastes, though, it’s worth recalling the inspirational life-line, drawn from foreign fields, that snakes back from Paul Simon’s Gra-celand, via David Bowie’s Lodger, to George Harrison’s sitar. And, given David Byrne’srole as an encouraging uncle to almost every North American buzz band lately, it was inevitable that some would finally get round to listening to Talking Heads’ afro-funk forays.

The Byrne-approved Vampire Weekend are the catchiest proposition. Four 23-year-old Columbia University grads, they make no bones about their preppy origins. Their jaunty songs rib rich kids’ affectations (“As a young girl, Louis Vuitton, with your mother on the summer lawn/As a sophomore, reggaeton, and the linens you’re sitting on”), salute upscale architecture (Mansard Roof) and enforce obscure punctuation conventions (Oxford Comma). They’re not pedants for musicology, though. Their trilling riffs and offbeat drums have the cognoscenti murmuring “soukous”, but their front man, Ezra Koenig, insists they aren’t attempting to replicate Congolese rumba.

“It’s hard to say where it comes from,” he says. “African music is so diverse, and, if you really want to take something as inspiration, and listen to it too closely, you’re not going to come up with anything new. I first heard a Fela Kuti record that my dad had. But, of any African music, we sound the least like afrobeat. King Sunny Ade [the Nigerian juju-music star known as ‘the minister of enjoyment’] was also in the house then.

“When we were doing our album, a compilation from Madagascar that I must have bought at a yard sale got me back into that clean guitar sound. A lot of modern African music is made with electric guitars, drum sets, electric basses – the same instruments Anglo-American rockers would use. We think of much African music as traditional, but it’s not. African bands are doing different things with the same tools.”

Vampire Weekend must have something right, however, for the Zimbabwean ace Louis Mhlanga to be a MySpace friend. Describing what they do as “Upper West Side Soweto”, they skip past any hint of cultural appropriation with witty self-awareness: “This feels so unnatural/Peter Gabriel, too,” goes a line of Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.

More scholarship informs the driving force behind Dirty Projectors, Yale-educated Dave Longstreth, a former flatmate of Koenig and arguably the most revered musician on the scene. Rise Above, his current album, rewrites Black Flag’s 1981 hardcore classic Damaged “from misremembered adolescent impressions”. Hardcore fans, look away now; it’s a stunning mash-up – messy yet precise, like the best free-jazz improv – of tribal thumps, fluid guitars, florid strings and the sonorous garble of two female voices and Longstreth’s Antony Hegartyish falsetto.

“Afropop isn’t a satisfactory name for those guitars,” he says. “They’re mostly ‘highlife’ in style, an older genre where mbira patterns were transposed onto electric guitar.” (An mbira, or thumb piano, is a resonating soundboard with metal keys.) “I’m interested,” Longstreth continues, “in fusing different musical languages and pointing out their hidden, shared qualities. Some African fingerpicking has the same kind of purity of feeling, and just joy, as Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier.”

Yeasayer are excited by another facet of African music: the trance-inducing drone. “We saw Konono No 1 live; they’re a million times more repetitive than us,” says the guitarist and co-vocalist, Anand Wilder. “A track would go on for ever, and I just couldn’t focus on it, but we learn from that and try to keep it in a pop format.”

Yet the Kinshasa metal-bashers aren’t the four-piece’s only ally in combating the tyranny of the 4/4 beat. “He’s become a bit of a hate figure in Britain,” Wilder begins, “but I love the way Phil Collins uses synth drums, or a spare synthesizer line, to create this incredibly foreboding atmosphere. You see, atmosphere is as important, if not more important, to us than the words and the riffs.”

All Hour Cymbals, Yeasayer’s splendidly frazzled debut LP, could be Fleetwood Mac following a camel caravan to some blissed-out desert shindig. Unspecified ethnic swirl, shot through with 1980s synth tones and echoes of Thomas Mapfumo, is topped off by tie-dyed harmonies to generate an ashram-sized warm glow of an album. Largely unheralded on its release last November, it is now garnering widespread praise.

“It’s not a particular part of the world that appeals to us,” Wilder maintains. “We’re just looking for sounds outside the main-stream influences for rock bands. It’s not even to break that structure – we were never in that structure in the first place.” Once half of a barbershop quartet with Yeasayer’s lead singer, Chris Keating, he speaks with some confidence there.

“We’ll look back on this period and think, ‘Wow, that was quite a renaissance of bands trying to push the envelope and do interesting things,’” Wilder concludes, and that view isn’t confined to New York outfits (see below).

Anyone sniping about kids in skinny jeans pillaging Africa’s musical coffers is surely missing the point: King Sunny Ade, for example, borrows freely from western pop. Longstreth, though, does raise a potentially more telling parallel from the 1960s when he says that interest in the old delta blues singers went hand in hand with support for civil rights and racial equality: “A stronger criticism you could make of indie-rock’s new interest in African music is that it doesn’t seem to be paired with corresponding interest in global equality or African politics. Imagine how cool, and how neat, that would be – but I don’t see it.”

Yet maybe it’s a sign of progress that, for these New Yorkers, Africa isn’t a special case. Pilfering influences and owning up to it is, after all, creativity at its most honest and collegiate. “We don’t set ourselves up as authorities in any way,” Koenig says. “Our music is a product of how we listen to music, which is, like, taking everything in.” Turning more people onto soukous is a “side benefit”; he wants Vampire Weekend’s album to be “taken on its own terms”. So, in a world without prefixes, the short answer to “Why borrow from Africa?” is: “Why not?”

Kenya dig it? More bands getting into Africa

Extra Golden Singing in English and Luo, this four-piece comprise an ethnomusicology PhD, his mate from Washington, DC, and two Kenyan benga specialists. Their current album, the delightful Hera Ma Nono, happily marries elegant East African grooves with postslacker rock.

The Ruby Suns A young American in Auckland, with a Zimbabwean stepmum, Ryan McPhun is a real global citizen. His roving ear takes in flamenco, safari found sounds and a South Seas sway on his band’s beguiling sophomore album, Sea Lion (out March 3). The song Kenya Dig It wins best/worst pun of 2008 to date.

Foals This Oxford quintet are many critics’ fancy this year. Antibalas, Brooklyn’s afrobeat revivalists, play brass on four tracks on Foals’ fiercely danceable debut album, Antidotes (out March 24). “They make it more universal-sounding and less Wasp,” says the singer, Yannis Philippakis. Hail the new princes of polyrhythm?

Coldplay Yes, fourth-album producer Brian Eno has turned them on to the Tuareg guitar marauders Tinariwen, and new track Glass of Water reputedly sounds “very African”. Mind you, they were into Kraftwerk before the last LP, and X&Y still rehashed the usual formula. Believe it when you hear it.

By: Richard Clayton