THE PREPPY HANDBOOK; With stylishly retro Caribbean influences, the new New York quartet Vampire Weekend prepares to make waves.(Brief article)

Byline: Lauren Waterman

The indie-pop group Vampire Weekend formed exactly four days in advance of their first gig, a so-called battle of the bands sponsored by Columbia University's school of engineering at which they placed, keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij reports, "third out of four." It was, to be sure, a slightly inauspicious start for the New York City-based quartet-which borrowed its name from a Cape Cod-set bloodsucker flick that singer-guitarist Ezra Koenig filmed the summer after his freshman year-but things have certainly turned around for the boys since: Last June, no less an authority than The New York Times named them "one of the year's most impressive debuts." Never mind the fact that their upcoming self-titled album was, at the time, still almost entirely unrecorded.

Seated in a tight semicircle in the small second-floor bedroom of Batmanglij's messy, underfurnished Brooklyn Heights apartment, the four newly minted Ivy League graduates appear utterly unperturbed by the outsize expectations surrounding the release of their debut. ...