No, they don't vant to drink your buzz

Vampire Weekend is a band of the moment. The New York indie-pop quartet appeared on the cover of Spin this month, played on "Saturday Night Live" two weeks ago and will headline a sold-out show tonight at the El Rey. Yet the group is also a throwback to the '80s, in the players' preppy sartorial style and the world-music flavor of such tracks as the modern-rock hit "A-Punk," from their debut album, "Vampire Weekend."

Still, the hype surrounding the band is a thoroughly modern phenomenon, as these four Columbia University graduates have generated buzz in new media (mp3 blogs such as Stereogum and Music for Robots) and old (the New York Times, the New Yorker). It's been so talked about that on Jan. 29, the day the album was released, New York magazine put up a tongue-in-cheek blog article titled "What to Expect From the Upcoming Vampire Weekend Backlash."

Singer-guitarist Ezra Koenig chuckles at the mention of the item. So much has been written about VW that he and bandmates Rostam Batmanglij (keyboards, vocals), Chris Baio (bass) and Christopher Tomson (drums) can't keep up . . . not that they want to.

"You really start to realize that the Internet is a very bizarre place," he says. "You can't worry about every little thing, positive or negative, that's written about you. I'm definitely at the point where I'm not interested in Googling 'Vampire Weekend.' "

He also seems reluctant to accept the group's status as a "blog band" with a rep fueled primarily by online buzz.

"You'll hear about bands on blogs now," he observes, "because that's just a new form of media. Yeah, some bloggers really got behind us, which is awesome. But I think that before, like, 90% of any blogs wrote about us, we had a piece in the New York Times. So does that make us, like, 'a newspaper band'?"

Vampire Weekend is often listed alongside the many increasingly popular bands incorporating "ethnic" styles, such as L.A.-based Cambodian psych-rock group Dengue Fever, Denver's gypsy-folk punk band DeVotchKa and British rapper M.I.A., who draws from Indian, African and many other diverse styles.

The intentions vary as much as the sounds: M.I.A.'s work is highly political, for example, while "Vampire Weekend" is playfully experimental and revolves around the upper-class Ivy League world of its players. Still, both M.I.A. and Vampire Weekend -- whose frontman once had a rap duo called L'Homme Run -- engage in the mashing together of styles that's a hallmark of hip-hop.