When you're ankle-deep in a soggy field, it is generally the uncomplicated aspects of rock music that go down best. After several days of sleep-deprivation, soap-deprivation and forced bonhomie, festival-goers are suckers for the big, dumb stuff: lighters-aloft choruses, guitar riffs with all the subtlety of a pounding fist and lyrics that consist of yodelled whoah-oh-ohs that can be reprised in the campsite for the rest of the weekend.
So one of the stranger things to occur at this summer's Glastonbury was the response to Vampire Weekend, four Ivy League graduates who specialise in elliptical wordplay.
The Brooklyn band are noticeably short on the sort of lyrical refrains that make you want to shout along and throw beer over your friends. Their two Glastonbury performances were scheduled on stages featuring bands whose boorish Anglo-Saxon indie rock, memorably termed 'landfill indie' by one critic, seems more in tune with the earthier appetites of festival-goers. Yet they could hardly have been better received if they'd been accompanied onstage by a weatherman promising blue skies for the rest of the weekend.
In their first set, frontman Ezra Koenig looked out over a bobbing sea of people singing the lyrics to 'Oxford Comma', a song named after an obscure point of grammar. 'This is an incredible experience,' he declared. 'I can't believe how many people we're looking at.'
Vampire Weekend's performance might have felt then like a happy anomaly, a fleeting moment of midsummer madness before festival orthodoxy, in the form of hundreds of mediocre indie bands, reasserted itself. But scenes like this are becoming increasingly familiar. In a fortnight's time, the Hold Steady, a five-piece also based in Brooklyn who deal in complex tales of teenage excess and Catholic guilt, will play at the notoriously unimaginative V Festival. Vampire Weekend will reprise their smarty-pants pop at the end of August at Reading and Leeds, festivals where the hint of an allusive lyric would traditionally see bottles of yellow liquid arcing towards the stage.
With acclaimed records from Fleet Foxes, and lesser-known but equally brilliant albums from alt-rock veterans the Mountain Goats, whose songwriter John Darnielle published a novel inspired by Black Sabbath earlier this year, and Silver Jews, a band based around poet David Berman, 2008 has seen a slew of witty, hyper-literate American groups who provide a much-needed corrective to Britain's indie malaise.
It would be pushing it to lump these bands into a collective scene. For one thing, their lyrics differ in style and content. Fleet Foxes create vivid pastoral tales in four-part harmony, Columbia University graduates Vampire Weekend specialise in tricksier wordplay. The Hold Steady's stories are often beer-soaked, drug-dazed and hormonal, while David Berman's lyrics are witty and bookish, more suggestive of an arched eyebrow than a narcotic rush. But what they share is a sense of lyrical ambition and adventure that is making this a vintage year for writerly US bands.
The Hold Steady's Craig Finn is not shy about stating his literary intentions. 'I consider myself a writer as well as a songwriter,' he says. 'The further we get on from the birth of rock'n'roll, the more people who have ambitions to be a writer feel that rock'n'roll is a worthy art form to express themselves in.
'I find playing songs and having people sing them back to you gratifying in a way that say poetry readings aren't,' he goes on. 'There, it's just 15 people being quiet and getting ready to read their own work. There's no sense of community and it doesn't seem as exciting as going out and trying to share your ideas with real people in front of you.'
Silver Jews' David Berman agrees: 'Over time, I've started to consider myself more a songwriter than a poet. Poetry is traditionally privileged as being a higher art [but] for me, there's more exciting work to be done today in song lyrics. Songs are an interesting place to try out different things that aren't being done in other parts of culture. In music, you can still work with sentiment, you can still make a song a slogan.'
Berman has a way with slogans and barbed couplets, but he also tells stories. 'San Francisco BC', from the latest Silver Jews album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, is a six-minute, break-up-saga cum heist thriller complete with a brilliant plot twist and the kind of bleakly witty one-liners that could have come from a Tarantino script. The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle also specialises in narrative songs and has scattered a series of short-story cycles across 16 albums.
Scratch the surface of Craig Finn's fist-pumping alt-rock and you discover a series of dark, densely plotted and interlinked tales, with a cast of recurring characters, most notably his teenage leads Gideon, Charlemagne and Holly. 'People have this idea of songwriting as being really personal,' says Finn. 'If you write a song, it must have happened to you - a confessional thing. But I find that rather self-indulgent. I have always been interested in creating characters and trying to make something more cinematic, something bigger.
'One of the things I like to use is an unreliable narrator; a lot of these [lyrics] are whispers and rumours and tales that are told. I think that's part of the fun. For me, rock'n'roll is linked a lot with discovery - growing up in the suburbs and thinking there's a bigger world out there. There's always been scope for complex narrative in rock music.'
This has not gone unnoticed by current rock-savvy American writers.
'I really do think this is a golden age for lyrics,' says novelist Ed Park. 'When you hear a lyric that's interesting and smart but also works with the music, it's such a gift and I feel like I'm hearing it more and more. Part of what was so exciting hearing the Hold Steady for the first time was taking Springsteenian lyrical grandeur and making it sound fresh and exciting. David Berman has this literary pedigree, and Vampire Weekend... lyrically they are rather elliptical and often not very linear, but the words linger in your mind. You get a sense with these bands that they are not afraid to go all out in their dedication to what comes before them in music and in poetry.'
'Becoming a rock star is something more graduates with literature degrees do than before,' says Benjamin Kunkel, novelist and co-editor of the New York journal n+1, which blends literary theory with pop culture. 'Rock'n'roll, which used to be for people under 30, is something you listen to from cradle to grave these days, and that puts new pressure on lyrics to be meaningful and intelligent.'
The prominence of these bands is also striking. The Hold Steady recently headlined the second stage at London's Wireless festival, which is not renowned for its commitment to literate rock. Vampire Weekend have already sold 140,000 copies of their debut album in this country. The current crop of clever lyricists has evidently been matched by a renewed taste for literary guitar music, previously the preserve of bookshop employees and trendy academics.
'The music of today that's popular has this cult of sound; a lot of reverb, a lot of oohs and aahs,' says David Berman.
'So there may be a thirst for articulated stories and ideas in popular music and folk music which was always a place where things could be said that couldn't be said in other places.'
For Fleet Foxes' songwriter Robin Pecknold, meanwhile, lyrics are starting to fall on more receptive ears.
'The days of the folk singer who uses music to convey broader social messages in a poetic way are over,' he says. 'But maybe people will look to songs again to tell them more than just what brands to align yourself with.'
Geoff Travis, head of Rough Trade, which releases the Hold Steady's albums in the UK, attributes this in part to the growing importance of blogs and social networking sites as a means of promoting bands. 'It is a leveller,' he says. 'Mediums of communication through the internet have given much easier access to quality music that's not defined by national radio or TV stations. They are the equivalent of the underground papers in the old days, but they're much easier to find now. And the medium is itself writerly.'
There's also the growth of boutique festivals in this country, such as Latitude and End of the Road, which have a greater emphasis on writing and theatre and whose line-ups are generally dominated by literary bands. 'These festivals give them a platform which wasn't there before,' says Travis.
But while all of this is cause for celebration, less cheering is the unflattering light it casts on our domestic music scene. The influx of intelligent American bands might be a welcome panacea to the mediocrity of most contemporary British guitar music, but you can't help cringing when you imagine what the Hold Steady must make of warming up the stage at V festival for the Pigeon Detectives.
'I am quite shocked by our lack of response to these American rock bands,' says Travis. 'We are in a kind of post-Libertines slough of despondency that we need to pull ourselves out of. I think we've been represented by a whole host of terribly mediocre bands in the last five years and I'm praying for a sea change.'
There are limits to rock fans' appetite for wordplay. Come a wave of earnest, below-par imitators and the sins of the landfill indie brigade would be quickly forgotten. But anyone who also values all that is big, brash and brainless about guitar music needn't be too worried by this resurgence of literary alt-rock. For one thing, they are in good company.
'I don't enjoy going and seeing a band and thinking they are like graduate students,' says Finn, whose gigs are rousing, air-punching affairs. 'I always wanted rock'n'roll to be big. Bands that are huge but also very smart; that's what we aspire to be.'
Vampire Weekend
Band members
Rostam Batmanglij, Ezra Koenig, Chris Tomson, Chris Baio.
Hometown
New York
Background
Vampire Weekend formed in 2006 as its members were coming to the end of their studies at Columbia University. Their early gigs took place on campus, at fraternity parties or in the ballroom of the University's Saint A literary society, whose chandelier is pictured on their debut album's cover.
Influences
Their distinctive sound - which they dub 'Upper West Side Soweto' - is inspired by African styles such as Congolese soukous and pop acts including the late South African singer Brenda Fassie. Their lyrics include references to French architectural features, arcane points of grammar and towns in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Koenig says
'Some people think that we are nerds who spend all our time in the library. With the lyrics, we try to approach subjects in a different way. Ultimately, most of the songs are about relationships, but you can still sing about girls without sounding too clichéd.'
They say
'Lyrically, they are elliptical and often not very linear but the words linger in your mind.' (Novelist Ed Park)
If you download one track
'A-Punk' from Vampire Weekend
...which has this lyric
'His honor drove southward seeking exotica/Down to the Pueblo huts of New Mexico/Cut his teeth on turquoise harmonicas/Oh-oh-oh.'
Silver Jews
Band members
Silver Jews have two permanent members - David Berman and his wife Cassie, backed by a changing line-up of musicians.
Hometown
Berman hails from Williamsburg, Virginia though the band began in Hoboken, New Jersey. He and Cassie are now based in Nashville, Tennessee.
Background
Berman formed the group in 1989 with fellow University of Virginia graduates Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich, who subsequently left to concentrate on their band Pavement. Berman is also a poet (his volume Actual Air has sold over 10,000 copies).
Influences
Berman cites the poets Wallace Stevens and Kenneth Koch as key influences.
Berman says
'I wouldn't let go of someone 's attention when I have it. I consider it something valuable I'm borrowing for a bit, I'm not going to spoil it by feeding them clichés.'
They say
'Berman's poems are beautiful, strange, intelligent, and funny. They are narratives that freeze life in impossible contortions.' (Poet James Tate)
Essential track
'San Francisco BC' from Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea
...which has this lyric
'Romance is the douche of the bourgeoisie'/Was the very first thing she imparted to me/We had sarcastic hair, we used lewd pseudonyms/We got a lot of stares on the street back then.'
The Hold Steady
Band members
Craig Finn, Tad Kubler, Galen Polivka, Franz Nicolay, Bobby Drake.
Hometown
Now based in Brooklyn, New York, four out of the five members have lived in Minneapolis-Saint Paul in Minnesota.
Background
Vocalist Finn and lead guitarist Kubler formed the band in New York in 2002, after seeking out local musicians who shared their love of anthemic rock'n'roll.
Influences
Finn cites Bruce Springsteen, Hüsker Dü guitarist Bob Mould and the Mountain Goats as well as hip hop artists such as Jay-Z and Aesop Rock.
Finn says
'What you're shooting for as a songwriter is to hit on a line that expresses a feeling that you have absolutely had before.'
They say
'Finn has established himself as America's reigning poet of drug-addled losers, the unflinching chronicler of their hard-luck adventures, nightmare visions, and occasional moments of grace.' (Novelist Tom Perrotta)
Essential track
'Lord, I'm Discouraged' (from Stay Positive)
...which has this lyric
'She says that she's sick but she won't get specific/The sutures and bruises are none of my business/This guy from the northside comes down to visit/His visits, they only take five or six minutes.'
Fleet Foxes
Band members
Skye Skjelset, Robin Pecknold, Christian Wargo, Josh Tillman, Casey Wescott.
Hometown
Seattle.
Background
In 2006 schoolfriends Pecknold and Skjelset decided to recruit local musicians.
Influences
Bob Dylan, Elliott Smith.
Pecknold says
'We decided the songs would be simple, about history, nature, and things around us.'
They say
'Exquisite voices thrum with life.' (Rolling Stone)
Essential track
'Oliver James', from Fleet Foxes
...which has this lyric
'On the way to your brother's house in the valley, dear,/ By the river bridge a cradle floating beside me. / In the whitest water on the bank against the stone / You will lift his body from the shore and bring him home.'
The Mountain Goats
Band members
John Darnielle is the one constant member; Peter Hughes and Jon Wurster are long-standing members of his backing band.
Hometown
The band was started in Claremont, California. Darnielle currently resides in North Carolina.
Background
Darnielle began performing under the name the Mountain Goats in 1991 while studying for an English degree at Pitzer College and working as a psychiatric nurse. Since then, he has produced 16 albums of highly literate lo-fi rock. Darnielle's first novel, Black Sabbath: Master of Reality, was published in April as part of the 33 1/3 series of books inspired by classic albums.
Influences
The Wild Palms by William Faulkner, American poet Richard Hugo, the Smiths.
Darnielle says
'People think it's pretentious to allude to classical stuff. I don't think in itself it is. It's how you do it. Do you present it like it was a thought in your head, or do you present it like it's a thought that you should really enjoy?'
They say
'John Darnielle is America's best non-hip hop lyricist.' (The New Yorker)
Essential track
'So Desperate' from Heretic Pride.
...which has this lyric
'We were parked in your car/In our neutral meeting place, the Episcopalian churchyard/I had things I'd been meaning to say/But in the dazzling winter sun that late I could feel them melt away.'