New music Tuesday: That new Vampire Weekend record is pretty good!

We don’t have to tell you that the new Vampire Weekend record Contra has been getting a lot of hype, even here in sleepy Milwaukee. A show at Riverside Theater was announced last week, and there were not one, but two listening parties in area bars. Contra finally drops today, and according to A.V. Club reviewer Marc Hawthorne, it’s actually pretty great. “Vampire Weekend’s new disc seems to have aspirations beyond just making a good impression in 2010,” he writes in his A- review. “It’s a career statement, one that’s letting the world know that these Columbia University preps have more than just a fleeting interest in world music, that they’re still aiming to impress but aren’t always going to take the easy route, and that sophomore slumps are for the kind of suckers who only had one good album of material to begin with.”

Also out today is Robin Thicke’s Sex Therapy, which gets a B- from Joshua Alston, who says the record isn’t “particularly sexy, but it’s often great, sometimes because of its lover-boy goofiness, other times in spite of it.” Considerably less great is the Young Money record label showcase We Are Young Money, which Nathan Rabin calls “pure bubblegum, the kind of instantly disposable pop ephemera listeners forget about while it’s still playing” in his C review.