An album not cool for a time not cool.

What does an artist most often become when the field in which they have flourished falls into fallow? Veterans of the "independent rock" boom of the mid-2000s (the scary reasons here) have struggled with this problem for years. In an era marked by streaming rather than the influence of music blogs, they have been overshadowed by rap and pop, as well as by a younger and more diverse generation of rock heirs with other concerns in mind. Now, after a six-year sabbatical (though productive), Ezra Koenig, still the superego and now essentially the sole owner of the Vampire Weekend group, is back with his own solution, perhaps starting with the worst disk cover of the year.

Whereas previous albums of the group presented photographs worthy of a gallery, The father of the bride It looks like an eco-profit concert poster from the 1990s, even though it bears the words "SONY MUSIC" stamped stamped under the amateur graphic of our mother, the big blue marble. It's an idea of ​​Koenig's idiosyncratic idea of ​​kitsch, not to mention the time when album covers have been reduced to thumbnails on screens, for everyone except for vinyl collectors (Koenig in the crowd can be happy to troll). But it's also a consumer opinion: Be careful, this album will not be cool. One could say that this album is not cool, for a little cold weather.

We could say that it's a cool album for a record time.

In a way, Vampire Weekend has never been cool. Despite the band's rapid success, which came directly from Columbia University, Village Voice sparked widespread reaction with its 2008 debut title, "Vampire Weekend: Hated On." The self-reflexive cosplay of the band under the name of Ivy League Graduates in Lacoste sweaters and boat shoes who were singing for Cape Cod and Oxford, but who were also shouting Lil Jon, felt like the ultimate culmination. a process by which a subgenre born of the underground post-punk became (or proved to be) a hobby for collegiate amateurs. And just in time for the wealth gap to spawn the turmoil of the 2008 financial crisis. Koenig's Hamptons-holidaying's lyrics were often punctuated by lyrics taken directly from South African, Congolese and Malagasy vintage pop, as well as via Paul Simon Graceland furthermore set them up for cultural appropriation charges. They were flogged as the pinnacle of indie whiteness, despite the Jewishness of Koenig and the co-ruler of the time, Rostam Batmanglij, being the son of Iranian immigrants. (American social binaries have computer problems for affluent non-whites.)

But Vampire Weekend's cultural flight and vampire class juxtapositions were too direct for theft and inequality to be at least partly his job. sure. The group appeared at a time when old hierarchies of taste, including rock, had become outmoded, and any sophisticated music lover would pretend to cross genres without prejudice (though selective). Of course). The problem is therefore whether the cosmopolitan anti-snob becomes a tourist consumer who claims all kinds of cultural expressions, whatever its context and distance from the situation of the listener. The strategies of Vampire Weekend and other music bands mixing genres, such as their Dirty Projectors buddies, as David Kenneth Blake wrote in a 2014 musicology dissertation on higher education and the "Elite pop", reflected "how universities encourage an ethic of criticism as such. The New Yorker noted in 2009 that Koenig had taken courses in Colombia such as "Plagiarism, Parody and Postcolonialism," as well as "Imperialism and Cryptographic Imagination," which could be the subtitles of the first Vampire Weekend Albums.

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At the time, it was not so long ago that I myself had aged in the demographic group of the alternative nation, a passage that led to the writing of a book that questioned the social implications of my own tastes . So even though I followed these debates, listening to VW music often made me feel like I was going back a decade. Their boulevard sound is partying, with its very hot rhythm section (drummer Chris Tomson and bassist Chris Baio) and abundant tasty hooks, made me think. party group about the grotesque overall injustice, then? In addition, too much of their lyrics feature female characters rich in 2D (the "basic bitches" of today), like Weezer for guys who have done postcolonial studies. It seemed to me that Vampire Weekend wanted to use its cultural capital and also invest in a high-yielding cultural capital fund. And could Koenig get rid of his pinchy voice, "Hey mom, look!"

At the time of their third album, 2013 Modern vampires of the citythe group had spent a lot of these ways. The independent explosion was also terminal, with the exception of the Taste Pools, which are summer music festivals. The album was therefore elegiac. On "Step," his best piece (and maybe even the best of the group), Koenig highlighted his own cultural trends: "Back, back, way, I used to face / Like, Angkor Wat, Mechanicsburg, Anchorage and Dar es Salaam / At home in New York, there was champagne and a disco / cassette of LA-slash-San Francisco. … I was an accumulator, but that was the case, girl. This earned the band critical reviews and a Grammy for the best alternative album, while the enemies were almost gone. But I thought that apart from his highlights, the album was heavily weighted, offering a young man an idea of ​​mature wisdom.

The father of the bride, on the contrary, it sounds like a real adult anxiety; it opens with a short, quick sigh, as if to say: well, here we go. The entire album, lasting 58 minutes and 18 tracks, seems concocted to slow down the time while asking the listener, So what happened to you in the last six years? "Harmony Hall", the leading single, reinforces the theme with its opening words: "We have made our wishes in the summer / now we are at the end of December". Such allusions to marriage are repeated throughout the album, serving as metaphors for bonds and commitments that could be personal, political, ecological and artistic. Koenig made this record for several years in partnership with producer Ariel Rechtshaid and a parade of guests (one of them, Batmanglij, who had officially left the party). During the same period, Koenig left New York to settle down and have a child in Los Angeles with actress Rashida Jones (making Quincy Jones' musical kingship a 'father of the bride', though the couple did not not legally married).

Koenig is already well qualified as a young provocateur. What he can be today is a man in his mid-thirties with a "restless mind," as he sings in "Harmony Hall" – worried about the misalignment between his own comfort and his good fortune, and the diabolical state of our clumsy blue – green globe. More I listened The father of the bride, the more I imagined that his subliminal motto was taken from Humphrey Bogart's Rick in the chronological order of Casablanca: "Ilsa, I'm not good at being noble, but it does not take much to see that the problems of three little people do not represent a bean hill in this crazy world."

Musically, this means mainly changing the echoes of Paul Simon of the 1980s Graceland at mid-empo, the singer-songwriter of the 1970s, his father Always crazy after all these years (which could be a subtitle for this album). The two men share not only their eclectic musical touchstones, but also a kinship between their sung vocals in New Jersey, their almost too intelligent composition ("they could have been smart / we're just too bright"), Koenig sings to about the fierce criticism "Unbearably White"), their consistent but defective liberalism, and their excessive mixture of ego and self-pity. They would be easy to dislike if they were not so good.

But the personality of the pair, which places them as underdogs among the initiates and both hipsters and squares, is also a New York Jew, and the awareness of this Koenig status is an undercurrent of The father of the bride. Indeed, his central character in the Netflix series Neo Yokio, although drawn in black and voiced by Jaden Smith, he is part of a clan of "magistocrats" who make fun of their backs by the city's elites, the WASP. upstarts and "Rat Catcher" – a coding not so difficult to decipher in this rising period of anti-Semitism. This concern is raised FOTB songs like "Sympathy", which refers to "Judeo-Christianity" as an artificial construction used as a weapon against "a third" (probably of Islam) by a dubious force seeking "the triumph of his will" . This is even more evident in "Jerusalem, New York, Berlin", with its reference to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that traced the trajectory of a Jewish homeland and to the singer's disappointment at the fate of such projects today.

Koenig traverses this axis between intimacy / domestic and global / cataclysmic in different ways throughout The father of the bride.

Papa-rock is partly counterbalanced and cracked by digital effects, samples and quotes that destabilize its sustained rhythm – excerpt from the choir sample singing the Solomon Islands' Christian anthem that repeatedly interrupts "Hold You Now" (From the soundtrack) at the thin red line, thus poorly attributed to the composer Hans Zimmer), twinnings with Steve Lacy of the Internet R & B / hip-hop group, "Sunflower" and "Flower Moon", who roll up the meditative tone of the album around the propellers of funk.

The most important guest, however, is Danielle Haim of Los Angeles sister trio, Haim (and also Rechtshaid's life partner), who is a featured duo with Koenig on three songs and a notable presence on several others, such as outstanding titles "This Life" and "Stranger". Having such a strong female voice helps to correct the boy club mood that has put me on Vampire Weekend albums: when Koenig sings on intimate partnerships now, this n & rsquo; Is not from a unilateral narcissistic point of view (Even though his character in the duos sometimes stands in this position, as when he plays a guy who tries to break a marriage while sleeping with the bride the previous night in "Hold You Now").

Judging by discussions on Reddit, Genius and other fan sites, Haim's duets are also the most difficult aspect for many long-time fans to accept, although they do not do not blame Haim herself as much as the influence of country music on them. numbers – the "yeehaw" part, as many call it. The duos are clearly intended to emulate the classic country duets of the George-and-Tammy variety, June-Johnny: the key phrase on "Married in a Gold Rush", for example, corresponds to "we are married in a fever ". cadence of the Carter-Cash "Jackson" standard.

But the country is actually much more deeply woven The father of the bride that most fans detect. For example, this line of "Harmony Hall" inspired by "the restless mind" evokes a song of the same name featured in the flagship album of 1962, the flagship album of Ray Charles. Modern sounds in country and western music. It was co-written by Jimmie Davis, the "singing governor" of Louisiana in the mid-1940s and early 1960s, and also a convinced segregationist. Does Koenig intend to boil this whole story under the song? It would not be out of character.

The country is woven much deeper into The father of the bride that most fans are detect.

Even on the song that most clearly recalls the roots of African ownership of VW – "Rich Man" is built around a sample of Sierra Leone's musician SE Rogie's Palm Wine, entitled "Go Easy With Me "dating from the 1960s, is in dialogue with" A Satisfied Mind ", a No. 1 country from 1955 for Porter Wagoner. The Christian-minded song claims "that it is so difficult to find a rich man out of 10 with a satisfied mind." At first, Koenig changed the nose of the song, claiming that one of those 10, "I am the one" – but by the end, he turned around to talk about the contemporary proverbial 1% or 0.001% (including surely the example of the White House), singing: "A billion against a / Chances do not they make you sick? a billion is a terrible turn / You are the wretch. Meanwhile, Rogie's skilful guitar pattern continues unabatedly in the background, serving as a greater awareness of the song.

On the swoony "My Mistake", Koenig laments part of the loss of "peace in the valley", using the title of a staple of the gospel become a hit of Elvis Presley. When he sang it The Ed Sullivan show in 1956, Presley dedicated it to the victims of this year's Hungarian refugee crisis (some of whom survived the Holocaust). And returning to "Married in a Gold Rush", I could not help but hear in his first verse: "Something is happening in the country / And the government is to blame" – an echo of the infamous and troubling scene of Borat The rascal clown of Sacha Baron Cohen sings in front of a real crowd of country-lounge in Arizona: "In my country, there is a problem / And this problem, it's the Jew," coming soon to make the majority of the piece sing in chorus, "Throw the Jew in the pit / For my country to be free! With a nationalist and Western impetus that you could hear up to Jerusalem, New York or Berlin.

The latter is probably a stretch. But that would suit the double-sided maneuver, I think Koenig is about to The father of the bride. After being accused for years of appropriating music from other cultures while denying his white privilege, he turned instead to American music, particularly condemned for its whiteness. It is with love, it is certain, he explained how to attend a concert of Kacey Musgraves made him want to write songs more direct and legible than his previous style. I think there is also an element in which, as a "coastal elite" elite, he wants to engage in some kind of dialogue with the parts of America from which he feels alien. With the typical sleight of hand of the Vampire Weekend, he is not on "Unbearably White" he returns to articles with titles such as "The Unbearable Whiteness of Indie" – this song seems to evoke anxieties of a much more existential order. On the contrary, it tackles issues of whiteness and dissatisfaction and partly spoils it thanks to this underlying country.

After being accused for years of appropriating music from other cultures while denying his white privilege, he turned instead to the American music that is most condemned for his music. whiteness.

That it disconcerts some of its listeners should not surprise, because country is one of the few genres on which many fans of music supposedly open still allow themselves to snub, as was the case during the debate around "Old Town Road. This is allowed by country associations with racism and reactionary politics, which are certainly real to some extent (though exaggerated by strangers). But it also allows listeners outside the central core of the country to dissociate themselves from the declassified unconsciousness of the country. In other words, congratulations, there are people for whom you feel better than! Sociological research on "omnivorous" tastes, cited in David Blake's thesis, confirms that country and metal are the genres most often excluded from this circle of musical acceptance.

I can not imagine that Koenig did not anticipate at least part of this reaction, as an artist who never took up the challenge he could not forget. Many listeners will also find the album too long and bulky, but I think this is also part of this big infusion of lack of freshness, just like on the cover – not to present us with any object tasteful and well done. Some critics compared it to the Beatles' White album, In this sense, it helps me cope with some of my least favorite songs, such as "Big Blue" (it's like one of those fuzzy George Harrison songs that can only be recommended as by guitar parts) or the worst Haim. duet, "We Belong Together" (a lazy exercise in a spooky word game that I'll call FOTB"Bungalow Bill").

Otherwise, I am attracted by its length extended by its tiny musical details, its rare ability to engage in a political crisis with a minimum of smoothing or slogans, and a tour de force that is to reinvent itself and even to redeem itself self. pray for congratulations. This is a lesson for any artist who is condemned to be ejected from youth culture. It's ultimately all of them: Give up the constraints of the cool, all of you who come in here, and go ahead and become the biggest fear of your young being.

The new Vampire Weekend album

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