Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend performs at Enmore Theatre on Jan. 9, 2020 in Sydney, Australia.
Hanna Lassen/WireImage
Five years removed from their earthy, Album of the Year-nominated fourth full-length Father of the Bride, Vampire Weekend has returned with another modern rock moonshot. For all of Father’s tie-dyed inclinations – and despite drummer Chris Tomson’s dalliances with the world of noodling, by way of his psychedelic side project Taper’s Choice – Vampire Weekend’s fifth full-length, Only God Was Above Us, returns the band to more familiar, erudite territory.
Already one of his rock generation’s best lyricists, Ezra Koenig further refines his craft here, rendering philosophical musings with succinct style and flair. And while Only God’s average track length is a minute longer than on any other Vampire Weekend album, the songs are no worse for it – rather, Vampire Weekend earns these run times by stuffing them with a wealth of ideas. Credit longtime producer Ariel Rechtshaid, who, since Rostam Batmanglij left the band nearly a decade ago, has become the de facto fourth Vampire – and helps to give Only God’s frequent chaos remarkable clarity. (Rechtshaid’s is just one of the liner notes’ impressive names; session musicians who have collaborated with artists from Travis Scott to Kamasi Washington worked on Only God, and studio whiz Dave Fridmann worked with Vampire Weekend for the first time as mixer.)
The new album internalizes the decade that’s elapsed since the band’s stately 2013 masterpiece, Modern Vampires of the City: Only God often feels like a funhouse of Vampire Weekends past, synthesizing the concise grooves of their self-titled 2008 debut and its 2010 follow-up Contra with Modern Vampires’ ornateness and Father’s feral side. With knowing musical and lyrical allusions to the group’s catalog, Only God is Vampire Weekend at its meta best.
Check out a preliminary ranking of the 10 tracks on Only God Was Above Us.
-
“Capricorn”
Channeling the wistful Vampire Weekend ballads of yesteryear, this single’s strength rests with its paradoxical – and self-referential – lyrics: The killer couplet “Too old for dying young / Too young to live alone” harkens back to both Modern Vampires’ “Diane Young” (“If Diane Young won’t change your mind”) and Father’s “Harmony Hall” (“I don’t wanna live like this / But I don’t wanna die”).
-
“Prep-School Gangsters”
“PREP-SCHOOL GANGSTERS,” the cover of the Dec. 16, 1996 issue of New York magazine declared, describing rich kids who “cruise the city in chauffeured cars, blasting rap, selling pot to classmates.” It’s a quintessential Vampire Weekend juxtaposition – this is the band that interspersed its punctuation critiques with references to Lil Jon on “Oxford Comma” – and thematically powers this mid-album cut. Session musicians spice up the relatively slight tune, with drumming by Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes and vibrant violin work from Eric Gorfain (Beyoncé, Frank Ocean) and Daphne Chen (Travis Scott, Lizzo).
-
“Mary Boone”
With its spare verses and faint choir, Vampire Weekend’s sentimental paean to the influential New York art dealer bears an immediate resemblance to Modern Vampires fan favorite “Ya Hey.” Booming drums, on loan from the club mix of Soul II Soul’s 1989 smash “Back To Life (However Do You Want Me),” invigorate and elevate the track.
-
“Pravda”
New York City mythmaking comes in many forms. “I know what lies beneath Manhattan / I know who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb,” Koenig informs listeners early in “Pravda” over the track’s gently bobbing bass. Later, he describes a less grandiose, but no less authentic, New York: “I had a job once in Penn Station / Down at a tie shop called Tiecoon.”
-
Ice Cream Piano
No easing in a la Modern Vampires‘ “Obvious Bicycle” or Father‘s “Hold You Now”: On the album opener, Koenig reintroduces himself with a categorical “F–k the world,” and within 90 seconds the album is off to the races. With thundering drums, distorted guitars, and dramatic string arpeggios, the album’s shortest song careens thrillingly through its brief runtime.
-
Hope
On the strongest, most ambitious album closer in Vampire Weekend’s catalog – and, at eight minutes, the longest song the band has recorded by a significant margin – Koenig delivers stanza after dispiriting stanza (“The phoenix did not rise / Now half the body’s paralyzed”) while always returning to the same exhausted exhortation: “I hope you let it go.” But halfway in, the track’s lyrical heft is overtaken by a bold, beautiful instrumental bridge – a melodic turn worthy of the historic urban grandeur the band has so often invoked.
-
The Surfer
Former Vampire Weekend member Batmanglij co-wrote and co-produced “The Surfer,” which rides a heady wave of dubby bass, melodramatic strings, horn-like synthesizers, and drifting slide guitar. “Fake fortune teller / Scandalized by fate,” Koenig muses over the blue instrumental. “Broke bodybuilder / Crushed beneath the weight.”
-
Gen-X Cops
If a classic Vampire Weekend rave-up like “A-Punk” or “Cousins” took some bad acid and wandered into a house of mirrors, it might come out like “Gen-X Cops,” which puts a darker spin on the band’s propulsive early material. (It’s Tomson’s sole co-write on Only God, and one of only three tracks on the album featuring both members of the band’s original rhythm section.) The lyrics mirror the fraught instrumental, as Koenig wails, “A gang of Gen-X cops assembles / Trembling before our human nature.”
-
Connect
With rhythmic allusions to “Mansard Roof” – the first track on Vampire Weekend’s first album – drummer Chris Tomson tethers “Connect” to the band’s past. The reference point is instructive, because otherwise this dense, jazzy epic illustrates how much Vampire Weekend’s musical scope has grown over its career.
-
Classical
Armed with one of the best riffs he’s ever written, Koenig spans civilization’s great themes in a little over four minutes – and delivers a track immediately worthy of Vampire Weekend’s own pantheon. As fuzzed-out guitars blare and saxophones bleat, Koenig cuts through the controlled chaos to wax poetic about times of war and peace, and offers a bleak summation of how history is written: “Untrue, unkind and unnatural / How the cruel with time / Becomes classical.”