Vampire Weekend’s new album, “Contra,” is no soothing weekend retreat. Filled with percussion of all sorts, vocals that sound nice for a moment and then sound like a dying mouse and overly prominent bass, this album is all over the place.

There is not one consistent theme throughout the album. One song sounds like mediocre Jason Mraz mixed with tribal, Jamaican, and bad experimental music, then the next sounds like a typical indie-pop song.

There is no consistency between the songs, either. It’s like one album with three different musical genres to it. The boys of Vampire Weekend try out one type of music, and then realize that they do not know if it fits, so they try another. It is good to experiment within a band’s musical framework and challenge oneself, but when listeners get used to one genre and the band changes it, it is not good. Listeners get confused. Vampire Weekend needs to decide what kind of band they are and what kind of album they are making. They have to decide if they want to be an experimental band, an indie-pop band, or a tribal, Jamaican band. Being all three is not working out for them.

This might be possible within three different albums, but not within one album.

They try to do the whole “experimental” thing that almost every band is doing these days, but they fail miserably. The way they play with the percussion is cool. It may be the only decent thing about this album, actually. But the odd percussion with the vocal and string instrumentals does not flow. They are too different. Listeners can’t even listen to the song completely. They have to decide either to listen to the percussion, the vocal, or the weird, unnecessary beeping that goes on throughout the songs.

 Listeners get used to the drum kit, and then the band cuts it and starts up a different percussion that has a totally different style than what was being played on the drum kit to start. Vampire Weekend gets going in a good direction and has good rhythm, but then they throw it away to try to add in cool effects, which in turn ruins the entire style and flow of the songs.

Like previously stated, the singer sounds like a dying mouse half the time. Don’t even ask what he is saying. More often than not, people will not be able to tell you. He doesn’t have a bad voice, but it is not good either. There are songs when it sounds like the CD is skipping; yes, he is that bad. In “California English,” it sounds like the vocal is on fastforward in a crappy car stereo system that keeps skipping at the bumps in the road. There are points when it is hard to decide if he is speaking English or if he is speaking gibberish. In the song “Cousins,” the entire song sounds like it is being paused and rewound just a second or so behind, so it starts back at what you just heard five seconds ago. In the beginning of the song, the vocal sounds like he is working on how to pronounce his vowels, not like he is pronouncing English words.

 There are actually songs I like, like “Taxi Cab,” but that is basically it. The song starts off with a good rhythm, good vocal, and good lyrics that you can actually understand, and it stays that way throughout the entire song. The style does not change like in every other song. They experiment with the instrumental, but it does not overpower what is going on. But, unfortunately, this song is unique to the album. It is different from everything else in the fact that it is actually good.

Listeners can tell where Vampire Weekend is going theoretically with “Contra,” but they completely missed the mark. A little more planning, and maybe dividing the genres listeners hear within the album into different albums, they could have succeeded. But mixing all of the above into one album does not work for them at all.