Some bands stay in a holding pattern their whole careers. others jerk the steering wheel hard and fly off the road. on their second album, vampire weekend do neither. or maybe they do both.

"I think we sound more like vampire weekend than we did on the first record," says drummer christopher tomson. 'contra' pulls off a series of impressive feats: it's bustling with fresh ideas, and yet it sounds immediately familiar; it's heavily layered but taut and kinetic; it chews ravenously through sound palettes and rhythms, and yet it's nimble and assured; it's still breezy, and yet it smolders with a newfound emotional heft.

Influences are incorporated with subtlety and sophistication, woven together into a seamless fabric of references that, heard in full, resembles nothing so much as itself. vampire weekend's music and lyrics serve to both construct and deconstruct a world around them. like the word 'contra' itself, the songs are layered with meaning and invite interpretation. With this album, vampire weekend have staked out an alien territory - literate, crackling, alive - that's unmistakably their own.