Vampire Weekend @ The Horseshoe Tavern

Vampire Weekend/The Postelles
The Horseshoe Tavern
Thursday October 8, 2009

I almost wet my pants when this show was announced. I know its probably no longer cool or hip to love this band, but I do, and I will scream it from the rooftops. Their debut is perfect in every sense of the word, poppy, upbeat, summery and fun.  And I was dying to see them in a small venue (last time I saw them was at Rogers Picnic, in the pouring rain with 4000 other fans).

As mentioned earlier, Vampire Weekend have confirmed details for their second album titled Contra, slated for release on January 12th in North America. The band are doing a string of dates as warm up gigs for the release of the record.  Toronto and Montreal were lucky enough to be included as their only Canadian stops.

Got to the venue mega early , met up with Mark, Raj and Kathy for dinner at Fresh prior to. The venue was empty and stayed that way through most of the opening band’s set.  Said band was NYC’s The Postelles.  I find that quite often I’m not a fan of opening bands (unless I know who they are).  I was pleasantly surprised how amazing these guys were, think Vampire Weekend merged with the early 00′s Strokes-like garage rock with a little 50′s pop thrown into the mix.   Their set was really great.  Their debut album should be out in the next 6 months or so (according to on-stage banter).

By about 10pm, the venue was packed, although I thought there would be more people there, I guess they didn’t oversell the venue. Vampire Weekend began their set with two new songs, the wonderful White Sky (which has been kicking around since the last tour) and Holiday. The new stuff is similar to their existing recorded material but has a looser, California pop feel to it.  They played a string of old songs which the crowd ate up and sang along to then went into more new material. Highlight in the new material was definitely California English. The Campus/Oxford Comma set closer was also quite great, the two songs merged was really fun.  The band encored with their new single Horchatta (listen to it below) and Walcott (another crowd favourite).  Set list below:

White Sky
Holiday
Cape Cod Kwassa
I Stand Corrected
M79
Cousins
California English
One (Blake’s)
A-Punk
Run
Campus/Oxford Comma
————
Mansard Roof
Horchatta
Walcott

It’s great to see a young band on the verge of releasing their second album having so much fun.  They really seemed to be enjoying themselves and it’s nice that they treated their Toronto fans to such an intimate gig.  I’m sure they’ll be back in the new year to play a much larger venue.

Listen to their new single Horchata below.

Photo via there are no words.  Check out the site for some great video also.

Now has a small article on the band here.