Vampire Weekend: Father of the Bride album

From the beginning, Vampire Weekend was a winner: charming, relatively light; Students from Colombia a year, the stars of the festival the following year. They had cute sweaters and smart jokes; they wrote with wit and curiosity on the tapestry of the privileged life; they carried themselves with an almost exasperating gleam. But they were also manic, strange and multicultural in a provocative way, mixing dancehall sections and digital strings, Latin punk and raga in a way that was wrong. And despite their superficial politeness, there was something deeply antagonistic about them, the vestigial bite of suburban kids who grew up adoring punk and hardcore, but who never really felt eligible for his anger. guitar-based music.

With time, they became bigger, denser, more serious. Their third and last album, 2013 Modern vampires of the city, felt almost haunted, each line was full of allusions, each space was full of strange and processed sounds. Even the silences crackled with old life, a poster in a street of the city removed to reveal the fragment of poster below. It was a bit, as originally, in New York, where the group was at the time, where you can not walk the streets without feeling disturbed by death.

Singer Ezra Koenig moved to Los Angeles, directed an animated series for Netflix ("Neo Yokio") and became a parent; Rostam Batmanglij – the group's Swiss army knife and in-house producer – worked with Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX, leaving Vampire Weekend in 2016 to work solo; the group lived in a pregnant break. Now we have The father of the bride-A larger album, wider than Modern vampires, the big sigh after a long breath. There are still moments of conflict, but in general, you feel that the group is simply relieved to have risen to the challenge of their existential doubts and come out relatively unscathed, grateful to be here. A glass of wine? Why not. Make it white, and if you have some, some ice.

Music (produced again partly by Modern vampires Collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid, with some cameos from Batmanglij) is sunny, festive, country-like, ABBA, lounge music ("My Mistake") and Brazilian jazz ("Flower Moon") and the barefoot exultations of Van Morrison ( "This life"). Just as independent bands such as Pavement cautiously resurrected 70s rock, Vampire Weekend revived – or recolonized – the sounds of the multicultural boomer of the '90s, when bands like the Gipsy Kings and Chieftains settled in. The US market , when the Indigo Girls and Rusted Root helped to constitute a popular alternative to the punk sound of "alternative music".

In the past, the group tended to rely on unusual juxtapositions; they present here their sound rather like a compilation, a set of cultural presets calibrated to induce nostalgia, revulsion, historical re-examination. (Hey, do you remember Tevas? Frogs of peace? A papyrus?) The message is sincere, but the sound bristles with an intellectual awareness, the protection you wear when you lose flavor. "There has always been this part of me [where] I see people beating on something and I just want to say, "What's really going on here?", "Said Koenig in a recent episode of his online radio show," Time Crisis " . For years, Vampire Weekend has implicitly threatened their perverse, annoying, class leader – look like Phish; Father marks the moment when the threat becomes a promise.

For a group historically obsessed with the world created by man, his technology, his culture and his stream of proper names, Father is relatively naturalistic, less cumbersome and confined to the head. Several songs ("Hold You Now", "Married in a Gold Rush", "We Belong Together") are literal duets between Koenig and Danielle Haim de Haim – the sound does not come from any one. only one who thinks, but two who tears it. , yin slowly reconciling with the yang. Themes include spring, rebirth, loss of old skin, and recovery of light; at one point, we return to the garden ("Sunflower"); to another, we hear the lullaby crickets ("Big Blue").

Of course, the garden – that innocent and fertile place in which we lived before civilization deceives us – is and has always been a fantasy, and the house is no longer home after we leave. There are times when the universality of The father of the bride feels forced, the sound of a restless mind that repeats itself repeatedly to relax, the paradoxical effort that people make in the name of laxity. Koenig said he wanted to try to write songs for which an auditor would not have to go too far to determine who could sing them. be clear, immediate, evoke the myth of the people, you know, like country music.

But Vampire Weekend has never been so readable, nor readable better than being a little obscure. Over all, Father makes me think of something like Bob Dylan circa self-portrait and New morning: The sound of an artist who tries to go back, in a fascinating way, sometimes antagonistic, on the gravity he has worked so hard to cultivate. "I think I take myself too seriously," whispered guest guitarist Steve Lacy at the beginning of "Sympathy." "It's not so bad." Well, but you can not say that a precedent was not created. Neither can you deny that the following song – a violent, gothic piece of flamenco that breaks with a jazz club and ends with a series of heavy-metal drums – is the most absurdly serious piece of music. here, and incidentally, one of the best.

Father This is the first time they sound too long, the first time they do not seem vital, but that does not mean that they have stopped moving; where applicable, with the exception of "Rich Man", a rhythmic rhyme that mixes a Celtic reel with a sample of the astonishing Sierra Leonean palm wine singer, S.E. Rogie – the music here is just a stone's throw away Modern vampires as Modern vampires was from Contra. Next are the Grateful Dead ("Harmony Hall") style guitar solos, the "Belong Together" singalongs camp, the Beatles meditations and cosmic insignificance ("Big Blue"). Exhausted by the big questions, they engaged in tiny reminders; once almost comical, they ventured, under certain conditions, to leave everything lying around – a gesture proportionally invigorating, indulgent, and periodically awkward as you expected.

In general, happiness is not a great art; at the very least, it is not as combustible as misery, desire, or any other feeling rooted in what we lack rather than in what we have. listen The father of the bride, I hear songs of contentment sung by people who tend to feel restless, songs of belonging by people who tend to feel as if they do not belong. I'm bored with the hustle and bustle of Contra, the size of Modern vampires, the way the band used to sound anxious and self-examine about their privilege, but now seems unconscious. However, it takes a certain courage to feel the weight of lightness, to admit that everything is fine. "I had the habit of freezing on the dance floor, I've been watching icebergs from the shore," Koenig sings in "Stranger," "But you have the heating on, a kettle that yells / You do not need to freeze anymore. life sometimes. And with that, the wallflower comes off the wall and begins to dance.