Or: why Vampire Weekend might resurrect the lost art of rhythm

Last year, the respected pop critic Sacha Frere-Jones wrote a cri de coeur in the New Yorker bemoaning the lack of rhythmic innovation among rock bands. The most highly praised "white" bands of the day - he cited Arcade Fire and Wilco - have ceased to draw any inspiration from "black" music, he complained, a far cry from the days when the Beatles and the Stones cited blues, R'n'B and Detroit soul as their main influences, or even when Talking Heads or PiL pilfered Afrobeat rhythms in the early Eighties. Where now is the cross-fertilisation?

Frere-Jones attracted a good deal of opprobrium for his thoughts, much of it well aimed - it is never sensible to generalise so broadly, or to criticise someone for something they don't do which you think they should. "The Cribs! Why is there no calypso on you latest album, you racists?!" Arcade Fire even felt moved to publish a response, demonstrating the exact points in their music where they borrowed from black artists. But though I have severe reservations - and numerous counter-examples - I can't help thinking that if the New Yorker didn't quite hit the nail on the head, he at least hit the nail, even if the result was a bent nail. "In the past few years, I’ve spent too many evenings at indie concerts waiting in vain for vigor, for rhythm, for a musical effect that could justify all the preciousness. How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities?"

Leaving aside racially defined markers - and a brief cavil: I do think Britain is different on this score, with a more eccentric mainstream in which Lily Allen can borrow an old calypso tune, Lethal Bizzle can hook up with Gallows, Just Jack can dare to exist - I think it's fair to say that most mainstream rock music is not very rhythmically interesting. (Neither is mainstream hip-hop; pop is another matter). Put simply, once you're even vaguely attuned to a more complex rhythm - through funk, or tropicalia, or drum'n'bass, or classical, whatever - the even bosh bosh favoured by Coldplay, James Blunt, Snow Patrol, etc, becomes intolerably banal, like eating a plateful of unadorned rice. The deliberate, dullard pounding that opens Coldplay's In My Place is, for me, the epitome of this (a noughties update on the weedier thwacks that heralded Oasis's Live Forever); it is not the earnest lyrics that bother me so much as this square noise - see Chris Martin prove my point, left: the four's the thing. It sounds to me like conformity, a mortgaged version of the house beat they pipe out in gyms and discos, which I have always found impossible to dance to.

Two more rhythms dominate rock right now: the bom-chik-bom-chik-bom-ba-dam-da-dom-chik bustle (see The Strokes' Last Nite), nicked by the early pop-punks from Motown; and the bom-chsh-bom-chsh polka (see Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out), a rock version of a house-beat, popularised by the Stone Roses. But once you identify them, it's amazing how little deviation you'll find. To the best of my knowledge, Oasis have never even left the comfort of 4/4 time, never thought to try writing a waltz.

By contrast, one of the main reasons Radiohead continue to outclass their imitators is their dedication to messing with beats; 15 Step, the opener to In Rainbows, reimagines speed garage in 5/8 time; Morning Bell alternates 6/8 and 2/4; after much counting, I worked out that Pyramid Song falls into a very lolloping 4/4, so syncopated as to almost be free. You, the very first song on their very first album, signalled their intent, opening with a guitar playing ambiguous triplets that only fall into place when the drums enter in 6/8; throughout, the band tricksily drop a beat every fourth bar, switching occasionally to 5/8. I'm not sure how much this adds to the song, but it does prove that from the beginning the band were willing to practise hard to confound the listener's expectations - dropped beats are very easy to screw up. And Radiohead prove that nothing reinvigorates a sound like a change of pace and step.

Anyway, that's all a very long preamble to introduce the New York band Vampire Weekend, one of my (and many others') tips for the year, for what it's worth, and a band that seem designed in response to Sacha Frere-Jones's piece.

I first heard them on New Year's Day, on BBC6 Music, my ears pricking up to the interview with the band (college-grad indie kids at heart) before they played their first song. They explained how they arrived at their single, Mansard Roof: they enjoyed tuning in to the reggaton stations of the Hispanic ghettos of New York, and were intrigued that this form of music, currently the sound of the Carribbean, all employs the same dancehall beat - dom-der-dum: chik! - a sound you don't often hear elsewhere. So they nicked it, sped it up beyond recognition and grafted it onto a swing-style tune they had. The DJ played the results - and my goodness did it sound refreshing, new yet comforting, an Alka Seltzer of a song. I've since tracked down an advance copy of Vampire Weekend's eponymous debut, and it's a trick they are adept at performing, borrowing from Afrobeat or baroque - whatever - to invigorate their sound, which is basically Pavement-derived college rock (Pavement a band for whom Frere-Jones reserves a deal of scorn). The results sound complex, but the principle is idiotically simple - and, to become an old man for a minute, used to be second nature to the writers of pop songs. Just takes a bit of imagination.

Anyway, Vampire Weekend play the Hoxton Bar and Kitchen on Thursday.