Who knew the different ways to sing "Louis Vuitton", and that the French designer's name would appear twice in songs from young bands in the first half of the year? Susannah Legge, from The Hampdens, drawls and drags her Louis Vuitton, as she does many of the lyrics on her band's debut album, The Last Party. Ezra Koenig, from Vampire Weekend, has a Louis Vuitton that is more playful, incorporating an upward French lilt that reflects the fresh and confident tone he strikes all through his band's self-titled debut. Vampire Weekend go even further: they sing, "Can you stay up / To see the dawn / In the colours / Of Benetton?" The Hampdens tell us, "French Vogue knows spiders cling to models' faces"; but then, this comes from a song called ‘Generation Y', and an easy way with labels and signs - their superficiality and benign incorporation into our lives - is perhaps one of the distinguishing features of smart bands of this generation.

The Hampdens - who formed in 2002 and are named after Hampden College, the centre of action in Donna Tartt's cult novel The Secret History (1992) - hail mainly from Perth and are based in Melbourne. Three EPs have preceded their album, while the band has been distilled to three chief members who also do the songwriting: Legge, on vocals, and two instrumentalists, Julian Hewitt and Gavin Crawcour. The album has been produced by the New York-based Victor Van Vugt, a genial and talented Dutchman who got his start doing live sound for Melbourne bands in the early '80s. His impressive resume as producer-engineer and mixer includes Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' The Good Son, Beth Orton's Trailer Park and Sarah Blasko's What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have. Van Vugt is not a surprising choice for a young band, given his sure hands in the studio and his ability to calm artists' nerves while satisfying record-company expectations. And his New York experience enables him to bring an adventurous, contemporary sheen to an album, which is attractive to Australian artists searching for something more than the meat-and-potatoes live approach of much local recording.

The record's sound is good. There's silky bass, programmed drums, and live drums that sound like programmed drums; synths either squelch and squeak in late-'90s fashion or are banked and layered in '80s mode, and there's tinkling piano and guitar. It's a lush, compact, Europop-influenced production. The early '80s also figure in the record's approach, as it was an era when pop-obsessed young things leapt from the underground, marrying a knowing wit to the brash new tools of top-40 sound. Bands like Culture Club and The Human League made glassy, hook-laden music that nodded to lyrical sophistication and adventure, while packaging themselves - both in image and on record - for the mainstream. The Hampdens are less subversive, but they are unabashedly a pop group and they have set out to make a pop record.

The first stumble on The Last Party is its length. Debut albums have to strive for impact, and having 14 songs all around the four-minute mark blunts first impressions. The fact that almost every one is mid-tempo is a further impediment, and means that the climb of the record is steady but arduous. No two- or three-minute songs enter midway through to offer respite and kick the album along. Another hurdle is the lack of melodic and structural invention: the songs revolve around familiar chord sequences and tumble into familiar choruses. The further the band moves from the strict pop formula that makes the first four numbers almost interchangeable, the more enjoyable and interesting it becomes. ‘Forget to Begin' benefits from trying less, aided by a chorus that doesn't leap for uplift. ‘Far Away' is almost folky, and has tension and a languid beauty that mirrors Legge's delivery and intimate lyric. ‘Miami' has drama and an appealing chopped-verse melody that sets it apart from the narcotic drift of much of the album's songwriting.