Vampire Weekend
Only God Was Above Us
I’ve always liked Vampire Weekend despite what I think is an unfortunate band name. I get that it was chosen from a short film that Koenig worked on during college (whose plot informs the song “Walcott”), but vampires were at their cultural nadir when they started out: their debut album was released in the same year as the first Twilight movie. I started university in 2009, and the first two Vampire Weekend albums were circulating on campus as background music for house parties and enjoyed even by people with no particular interest in indie music outside of, say, MGMT. It was a weird time: you were a hipster if you liked Vampire Weekend but you were a bigger hipster if you disliked them, but no one could say which was truly worse. The release of the comparatively more mature Modern Vampires of the City in 2013 coincided with the year I graduated from university, and I must have listened to “Ya Hey” dozens of times that December as I trudged around the Toronto slush finishing up my final exams. All this to say, this terminally-uncool band soundtracked a small part of my young adult years.
Their ascent was fairly meteoric: they landed on the best songs of 2007 for Rolling Stone, and Vampire Weekend was reviewed positively everywhere, most notably Pitchfork. At the same time, they were also met with a fair amount of skepticism as they navigated criticisms of whiteness and, especially, class. Koenig gets defensive about this in interviews, and even cheekily named one of their songs “Unbearably White” in response (some ten years later). He’s stated outright that “Nobody in our band is a WASP” in 2009. He talked openly that he paid for his Ivy League education with a mix of student debt and scholarships. He’s complained to Billboard that “There were a lot of bands who came from upper-middle-class backgrounds. But such a big deal was made that we went to Columbia — off the top of my head, there were members of Animal Collective, The Walkmen and The National who went to Columbia, and the amount of ink spilled over their collegiate and class background is not even close.” Koenig has said a few times that if he wore different clothes like leather jackets then the band would not have faced as much criticism because they presented themselves as preppy Ivy Leaguers; he’s joked about his “God-given right” to wear a polo.
These always seems to miss the root of the criticisms, which followed Vampire Weekend and not the forgotten Walkmen or the fucking National for the obvious reason that Vampire Weekend’s music is influenced by black music outside America. The fact that people still to this day have a problem with Paul Simon going to South Africa, working with, properly crediting and generously paying South African musicians compared to their standards at the time—ignoring the cultural boycott at the time that got him blacklisted from the United Nations while doing so—meant that four Columbia graduates with no connection to Africa weren’t going to get away easily with making an indie-friendly version of Graceland in 2008. This is regardless that three of the four members of the band have Jewish, Persian and Italian roots, regardless of any student debts he might have incurred while studying at Columbia, regardless if Koenig wore a leather jacket.
Better than these interview segments where Koenig seems lost in the sauce is that it’s obvious they’re self-aware and even self-critical about their privilege in their music. They wore their preppy backgrounds on their sleeves on debut Vampire Weekend with songs about romances on college campuses and young girls with their Louis Vuittons; no other band could have possibly thought of the line “Spilled kefir on your keffiyah” which is perhaps my favourite line from them. “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” is directed at the Students for the Preservation of the Oxford Comma in Columbia, while “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” reflects on colonialism and slavery over the album’s most minimalist instrumental. They mixed their influences so it would be harder for the layman to correctly criticize them: “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” talks about reggaeton while the song itself has nothing to do with genre, whereas reggaeton was the basis behind the beat on “Mansard Roof.” But at the same time, they don’t go deep enough with these sounds, and so too much of this plays like generic indie pop; “One (Blake’s Got a New Face)” should have not left the recording room. It does not help that Ezra Koenig’s voice reaches for the youth and sincerity that came easily to Paul Simon—that, after 60 years of singing, still comes easily to Paul Simon—but often lands in a zone of pleasantry so “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” doesn’t have the effect that I’m sure he would have wanted.
Contra arrived in the first month of 2010, and though it sold only a fraction of its predecessor, it did what Vampire Weekend and a lot of indie around that time could only dream of: it topped the Billboard charts. I figure Mercury was in retrograde. It’s an album that takes more risks, however modest, than their debut, and so you get misfires like “California English” using autotune to make the hyperactive vocals even more jittery while “Cousins” somehow outdoes “A-Punk” in both speed, spunk, and complete and utter meaninglessness; “Giving Up the Gun” is a fan-favourite but the electronic beat sounds stuck in 2010. At the same time, they add decorations that go deeper such as the murmuring strings in “Taxi Cab” or the M.I.A. sample in “Diplomat’s Son,” and I think the bookends are among the best songs that Vampire Weekend have ever written. There’s a real power in Koenig’s voice when he belts out “Here comes the feeling you thought you forgotten” on “Horchata” during the euphoric choruses, while “I Think Ur a Contra” mixes up Brian Eno’s ambient with David Byrne’s rhythmania and comes out sounding like an Eno-Byrne collaboration more than the actual Eno-Byrne albums (no disrespect to either of the two albums they made; I like both more than this).
With Modern Vampires of the City, they made the leap from a tuneful band into a textural one — that was still quite capable of tune. There’s a few flaws: “Hudson” is a dirge and Batmanglij’s “Young Lion” is a Bon Iver demo that wandered in—so the album’s comedown comes down too much—and how much you like “Don’t Lie” is dependent on how much you think it’s clever that the band put in a sound of a ticking clock after Koenig sings about one. (I personally think it’s lame, and stuff like this is always hit-or-miss.) And sure, the “Diane Young” pun is whatever, and makes me wonder if they heard Hüsker Dü’s “Diane” which leverages the same phonetic coincidence to greater effect (“Diane” sounds like “Dying”).
But I’m forgiving of all of that because even if it’s not physically true, most of the songs at least seem to change in tempo, mood, or dynamic in a way that their previous songs simply hadn’t. “Diane Young” would’ve been a bop on Contra but the pitch-shifted vocals make it extra fun; the squelchy drums on opener “Obvious Bicycle”—a sample of “Keep Cool Babylon”—are strange, addicting, and far more enticing than the drum textures of almost everything they’ve done previously, and the backing vocals within are the morning’s red sun that Koenig sings about.
Two songs here are the best they’ve ever written. “Hannah Hunt” starts with what could be field recording of waves on frozen beaches giving way to Ezra Koenig musing quietly over keyboard chords about someone named Hannah Hunt. Graceland is no longer the model. Instead Koenig looks even further back in Paul Simon’s career to Bookends with Garfunkel, specifically “America.” Both songs feature a lot of movement—physical and spiritual—from young adults trying to make their way through this strange thing called America (“We made our way from Providence to Phoenix” and “we glided on through Waverly and Lincoln”). The line “In Santa Barbara, Hannah cried, ‘I miss those frozen beaches’” successfully evokes the images generated from the first few seconds of the song, while the climax—short and powerful, where the keyboard line sounds like steel drums—is the sound of two idealists realizing that the American Dream holds no water. Meanwhile, “Ya Hey” looks for inspiration in the groovier second half of Bookends. It’s where bassist Chris Bajo finally starts putting in his hours as the song folds in the religious confusion of “Everlasting Arms,” the machine-assisted vocals of “Diane Young” and the piano lines of “Step” into something truly epic: the Rolling Stones reference is neither forced nor unearned. 2013 was to indie rock what 1973 was for 60s’ rock: the realization that the dream couldn’t last forever. Vampire Weekend did what many of their contemporaries didn’t do or simply couldn’t do: they grew up.
In 2016, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij—who also helped produced all of their records thus far—announced his departure to pursue both his solo career and continue his pop production career for Carly Rae Jepsen, Santigold, and Solange — he’s responsible for one of the best songs on Frank Ocean’s Blonde. The general consensus amongst many of us that followed Vampire Weekend was that he was chiefly responsible for the leap to Modern Vampires of the City, and that the band wouldn’t be soldier on without him, let alone make another record on par with it.
The album that finally arrived three years later did them no favours to quench any doubts. They surrounded themselves with a bunch of other musicians for Father of the Bride, including Danielle Haim and Steve Lacy, Kendrick Lamar producer DJ Dahi, and Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth, among others. Most of the album’s 18 songs are short and not nearly developed enough: “Hold You Now”’s sudden use of the Hans Zimmer sample feels like Koenig wanted to try something akin to Kanye West’s “On Sight” but he doesn’t have balls to pull it off; “Big Blue” builds to disgustingly histrionic choral voices like a Kamasi Washington production when they should have capitalized on the George Harrison-like slide guitar instead; closer “Jerusalem, New York, Berlin” sounds like a demo from Modern Vampires. Meanwhile, the Jenny Lewis sample throughout “2021” is a certainly strange decision, as is Danielle Haim playing around with digital effects on her voice at the end of “This Life” (whose hook comes from ILoveMakonnen of all things), as is the exaggerated drum and strum on “We Belong Together,” where it’s hard to believe that it’s the song that Rostam Batmanglij swung by to produce because it’s easily the worst-sounding song of the bunch. “How Long?” sounds like a re-hash of Lily Allen’s “My One” (which featured Ezra Koenig); the lines “Something’s happening in the country / and the government’s to blame” on “Married in a Gold Rush” reminds me of Radiohead’s “No Surprises” (“Bring down the government / They don’t, they don’t speak for us”): just absolutely no thought went into these lines beyond “government = bad!” So lots to groan about as you can see: it’s easily their weakest album. That said, “Harmony Hall” is one of their best songs, and the guitar sweep reminds me of a lot of great African music that came out earlier that decade, and “Bombina” is a short slammer that follows.
So I didn’t know what to expect with Only God Was Above Us, but the cover art—a Steven Siegel photograph of an abandoned NYC subway train in a scrap yard—brought to mind the smog-polluted cover of Modern Vampires of the City in a way: both imaginings of a dystopian NYC by using images of the past. My first listen of the album was on a car ride with my fiancé and we found the distortion underneath many of the songs confusing if not outright bracing: it’s the first Vampire Weekend where I didn’t know where I stood on my first listen, which is a far more exciting prospect because that meant it could grow on me — whereas their previous albums have stayed the same in my estimation. And that’s exactly what it did. It’s quite easily their second-best album, and the only one in their catalogue where there isn’t a song that doesn’t work all the way through. There’s a feeling of familiarity in the wealth of Baroque piano lines that Father of the Bride was skimp on (that we all attributed to the loss of Batmanglij), or how “Gen-X Cops”’s guitar line recalls the rush of “Walcott,” or that the soukous-inspired guitar line of “Classical” harkens back to their curious early days. And yet, the album feels new for them in a way that Father of the Bride assuredly didn’t in its retreat. There’s more rock in the fuzzy guitar chords in “Classical” than their previous attempts to “rawk out” (“A-Punk,” “Cousins,” “Diane Young,” and “Sympathy”: all fun but never super convincing). Meanwhile, Koenig has always had some interest in rap music—Contra b-side “Giant” riffs on Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy”—and he takes inspiration from early-90s’ east coast rap music for “The Surfer” with its dissonant piano, empty space and parking lot chatter.
Best of all is the closer “Hope.” At 8 minutes in length, it’s far longer than any of their previous songs by about 3 minutes and ranks among the best things they’ve ever done. In a song about loss and defeat, Koenig’s forever-pleasant voice makes the pessimistic refrain of “The enemy’s invincible / I hope you let it go” still sound, well, hopeful despite urging “you” to just let the enemy—which the songs names outright as the U.S. army—win. And when he changes the framing in the final instance of the chorus to “The enemy’s invincible / I had to let it go” it becomes one of their very, very few songs along with “Hannah Hunt” that can be considered devastating.
There’s been a lot of music that I’ve enjoyed released this year, but Only God Was Above Us is the only album that makes me feel nostalgic for that brief period of time in 2013 back when I was young, dumb, and about to set forward into this strange and boring yet also turbulent thing called adulthood.
Vampire Weekend - B+ Contra - B+ Modern Vampires of the City - A- Father of the Bride - B Only God Was Above Us - A-