It seems likely that the level of excitement you're experiencing about Vampire Weekend's sophomore full-length is inversely proportional to your opinion of the major indie rock trends of 2009. There was the whole chillwave thing, of course, with a ton of bands making ostensibly dreamy, keyboard-heavy pop music that occasionally just sounded cold and robotic. Then there was glow-fi, which I guess is sort of the same thing: hazy, basically. 2009 was covered in an impenetrable layer of haze and characterized by a sense of detachment that seemed either cool and subversive, like that first wave of lo-fi back in the 90s, or desperate and lazy—an empoweringly tossed-off fuck-you or well thought-out cover up for not actually having very much to say, or for not having a particularly interesting perspective. Personality was hard to find in 2009, either because it was buried beneath all that haze, or because it simply wasn't there.

And now here we have Contra and its opening lines, sung in a crystal-clear voice, accompanied by a gently tapped marimba: "In December drinking Horchata/ I'd look psychotic in a balaclava." "December" is pronounced so that it rhymes with "horchata" and "balaclava." "Psychotic" gets a hard T. It might seem pretentious, it might seem nonsensical, or it might seem right off the bat like a song whose narrator just hates the winter. Either way, it's something, and you can fucking hear it.

Over the course of the record, what you'll hear is basically more of what you heard last time. It's more influenced by non-white-boy indie rock than their first record. It's more pre-occupied with class issues. Singer Ezra Koenig has grown confident enough in his vocals that he's more willing to squeak and squeal whenever it seems right. Basically, either they never got around to reading the complaints made about their debut, or they just decided to ignore them. And as a result, your opinion of the band in 2010 will most likely be directly proportional to your opinion of them in 2008. If they bothered you then, you'll probably want to cause physical harm to them now. But if you found their self-titled debut refreshing and interesting and, above all else, stacked with a set of melodies so effective it was ridiculous, well, then you'll probably like Contra even more.

To anyone who signs on for a close listen, there are some subtle but important differences this time around. Musically, things are more complicated. The guitar plays a far less central role than it did previously, giving way to a larger assortment of keyboards and strings that help make their experiments with styles as disparate as baile funk, Afro-pop and calypso sound even richer. They've gotten better at their instruments too, and while, yes, I know, "dude, they fucking shred" is not going to win me any arguments, they pull off some impressive technical stuff here. The drums have grown even more melodic, Rostam's arrangements have gotten more intricate and detailed, and Ezra's managed to achieve one of the more instantly recognizable guitar tone of anyone this side of, you know, John Mayer.

Lyrically—and this is where the band's detractors have typically done most of their detracting—Contra is distinctly more post- than undergrad. Koenig's no longer musing about college campuses and classrooms, or about fleeing your hometown for something more exciting. Instead, it's the opposite. On the devastating album-closer "I Think UR A Contra," the narrator realizes something about a woman who seems to pop up all over the record: "You wanted good schools and friends with pools/ You're not a contra./ You wanted rock 'n roll, complete control./ Well, I don't know." It's a partner in crime from the first album's "Walcott" a few years older, less willing to fight the fight that brought them together in the first place. It takes the band out of the fantasy world of collegiate life and places them right here with the rest of us. It's a universal and often depressing subject and he deals with it gracefully and with a level of maturity that escapes even people much older.

"California English" is the song that will get the most attention, for no reason other than that the vocals are hit with a little bit of auto-tune at one point. But it also contains one of the album's most important lyrical passages. It's a song about the superficialities of language, and about our (in this case class-conscious) affectations being exposed as meaningless.

"Sweet carob rice cake
She don't care how the sweets taste
Fake Philly cheese steak
But she use real toothpaste

Cuz if that Tom's don't work
If it just makes you worse
Would you lose all of your faith in the good earth?

And if it's all a curse
And we're just getting worse
Baby, please don't lose your faith in the good earth."

Here, and in other places on the record ("Taxi Cab," "Holiday"), Koenig is testing out the possibility that there's life beyond the choices we make in our early twentiess—about going vegetarian, about using all-natural toothpaste, about which subway line we live off. He doesn't sound entirely convinced just yet, but he's open to it. On "Giving Up the Gun," he sings, "You felt the coming wave, told me we'd all be brave./ You said we wouldn't flinch./ But in the years that passed/ Since I saw you last/ You haven't moved an inch." It's likely the "gun" in question is a guitar, and that he's singing about the outdated notion that a guitar can change the world, but it could also be read as the recognition of contradictions and unfulfilled promises of a certain lifestyle.

The catch here is that the lifestyle he's talking about, and the lifestyle the band so expertly embodies, may or may not have anything at all to do with your own. This isn't their problem, of course. They've proven, twice now, that an awful lot of good can come from looking outside one's own little world for inspiration. The rest is up to us.