For a quartet of Columbia-educated indie-kid white-boys, the Vampire Weekend debut sounded really African. “Primitive drums”? Synthesizers that “sound like the sun”? Bubbling with “joyous harmonies”? And I quote from some of the most read and respected reviewers on the Internet. It was a sad, sad time for African popular music.

Postcolonialist throwbacks aside, it was clear – even before the spread of ‘A-Punk’ through grotty clubs worldwide – that Vampire Weekend was a pretty lovely collection of songs. It assumed a position somewhere between the annual reminder of fake D.I.Y pop past, and the OC generation’s preppily updated American Dream. Sure-to-be single ‘Holiday’ pops out as a solid piece of buttoned-up pop, with jutting guitars, rim-clicks and an elegantly dead-pan vocal delivery, whilst ‘White Sky’ is a synthed-up ‘M79’, complete with civilised chamber-ensemble sensibility.

Predictably, things sometimes go awry. ‘California English’ sounds like a hyperactive 13-year-old let loose on a vocoder. There’s probably something clever going on, but quite what it is remains a mystery. ‘Giving up the Gun’, meanwhile, is a filthy flop. Chugging electro riffs weigh down Koenig’s suddenly witless whine, and even the vaguely uplifting refrain can’t make good the bad. Though tighter, punchier, and boasting a startlingly beautiful closing track, all the ingredients that made VW 2008’s buzz-band are still here.

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