12. Connect
Vampire Weekend put out a great album this year, and there are many songs from it I enjoyed. It was a difficult choice between this one and Classical.
Connect won out in the end because I love the piano, the production, the structure, everything.
You cannot outrun the future. The hauntings of ‘Mansard Roof’s’ drum patterns try to implement themselves on the percussion of this song, bashfully, but they are stopped abruptly every time. Vampire Weekend’s first ever single, itself a song about sightseeing and essences that have been lost, can no longer be connected to. Instead, we are left with that same piano, jauntily spinning away.
Suddenly, as the piano’s skittish scales blur, we realise it’s all “happenin’ too soon,” a proverbial “book of Revelations” – predictions about our futures – changing from prophecy, to current reality. Those days of acid in the park and grand spiritual discoveries are long gone. Chair-based vacations (how exotic) are the equivalent of those faded adventures.