“When anyone starts a band, you don’t picture your show getting reviewed in The New York Times. We see the kind of work that still has to be done.” But with the band in the midst of a national headlining tour, the message is clear: small music miracles can still exist in today’s overcrowded, digitized times. Good, original music can still prevail, engineering schools be damned.
     Anchoring all this vampiric interest is a peculiar but inescapably joyful sound that seeks common ground between the Kinks, Beethoven, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. And who knew that ground even existed? “We wanna make music that’s catchy and fun on one level but also with interesting stuff going on in the string arrangements and rhythms,” says Tomson, sleepy-eyed in the aftermath of an all-night drive from Boston to New York in a silver 2004 Honda Odyssey. (“Our first big investment,” he adds.)
     The band’s moniker derives from a film Koenig started making during his first year at Columbia. Vampire Weekend follows a guy named Walcott (also the title of one of the album’s most infectious tunes), who is journeying from New Jersey to Cape Cod in the midst of a nationwide invasion of bloodsuckers.