Vampire Weekend

If you haven’t heard of Vampire Weekend by now, you must be living under a particularly sturdy, FM-free rock. The Ivy League rockers have had their mugs plastered all over the more palatable outer fringes of alternative culture. The band’s smash eponymous debut exploded in 2008, and this year’s Contra enjoyed heavy publicity, after the band was snagged in a web of legal troubles over the cover’s maybe-unauthorized Polaroid of a model from 1983. Vampire Weekend brings a lighthearted nerdiness to bright, global, white-guy pop; it’s the kind of act that’s happy to rhyme horchata with balaclava and Masada. (Kudos, Ezra Koenig.) The band’s sweet, mannered calypso makes a fine soundtrack for reclining in white Sperrys on the deck of your yacht.