Vampire Weekend's "Father of the Bride"

Has there ever been a better time to enjoy the Vampire weekend? It's a band, of course, whose modus operandi has long been to break through the bubble of wealthy privileges surrounding places like Cambridge and Manhattan so we can all have a look at it. inside. Think about what may be the best, if not the most important news of the year: the revelation that wealthy families on both coasts have paid six and seven sums of money as part of a program developed so that their children are accepted in some of the most prestigious universities in the world. country – or, at the very least, UCLA. In 2007, Ezra Koenig had trouble escaping from Cape Cod because "Hyannis Port is a ghetto" may have been deflated and shortsighted. But now, a decade or more later, with the CEO of Hyannis Port Capital arrested for attempting to buy his children's registration at USC, Stanford and Harvard, it can only be read as a prescient.

So it's funny that the current moment also finds in the group a new chapter, Koenig creating the first album of Vampire Weekend without his main collaborator, Rostam Batmanglij. In addition, the group emerged victorious from the war to which he had already been forced to embark – when he was perceived as representing the privilege of the whites instead of a clever examiner, when the portrait of Koenig of a rich girl growing up wearing Louis Vuitton, but now listening to reggaeton on the campus lawn, was considered a celebration instead of deflation. Classroom, culture, and college conversations can always liven up the lives of those who use social media or watch the news, but Vampire Weekend, if it is, can be considered an ancient a battlefield fighter who seems to be producing new victims every day.

As such, their new album The father of the bride is more personal and inner than any of their previous three, although Koenig seems comfortable creating with the shadows of these old controversies still looming. When the group recently released a double single with songs entitled "This Life" and "Unbearably White", it was a silent but cautious lure; this is the first song whose chorus is suspended from a couplet on the privilege: "I cheated through this life and all its sufferings / Oh, my God, I'm good for nothing?" – and the last one calmly meditates the inner life of a man. couple separating. The refocusing of this perspective is not the band's best album – it's probably the worst album – but an enriching and fleshy development in the history of a band that has improbably emerged as lifers.

When Batmanglij left the band, he did it partly because he was beginning to immerse himself in the waters of pop music and wanted to see what was alive and well. (Generally, you can not blame a homosexual man for wanting to work more with Charli XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen.) Vampire Weekend was popular, but it was not really pop. Despite consecutive albums No. 1, they have never appeared in the pop charts. They instead chose a niche on rock radio as a slight, playful indie antidote and scholar against the otherwise extremely explosive and wrapped anguish that surrounds them on the airwaves. Koenig, however, may have followed the same muse as her former group mate, just along different paths. The father of the bride was created primarily by Koenig and Indian-pop-independent king Ariel Rechtshaid, but with the help of producers such as DJ Dahi (Drake, Kendrick Lamar), Bloodpop (Justin Bieber, John Legend) and Ludwig Göransson (Childish Gambino). What we have left is a stylistically stimulating album that enriches and alleviates the band's preppy and preppy sound, affecting country music and acoustic rock stoning – the kind of thing you might hear, for example, impromptu concert of Earth Day in a park.

Suitably, when at its best, The father of the bride breathe like no other vampire weekend before. Koenig's voice, a taste no doubt acquired, but the dominant sound provided by his band, is most often surrounded by the air around him – a distinct sensation of space that gives what could otherwise be an album restless and disconcerting a sense of relaxation. This production works best when it is associated with songs in which Koenig examines the troubles between two people with a measured calm and finds a place of solace. The "Hold You Now" opener starts the album with Koenig and Danielle Haim playing two condemned lovers in as distressing a situation as possible: Haim is a bride on her wedding day and her husband is not the character of Koenig even if both speak in a room somewhere. "I can not carry you forever," Koenig sings, "but I can hold you now," a guitar with pinched fingers wrapping them in a shine. "Spring Snow", which appears 16 tracks later, finds the narrator in a similar situation, with a snowstorm at the end of the season keeping two lovers together as they were about to disconnect. "The end has been delayed, you're here in my arms," ​​sings Koenig, "so what shall I say?" The answer, it turns out, is nothing, a chorus without words that offers the listener a sort of ephemeral serenity.

Rechtshaid is a sonic superproducer without sonic fingerprint, and you get the sense of The father of the bride that his role was not to guide Koenig in any direction, but to provide him with enough space to explore what could be a Vampire Weekend song in a post-Rostam world. On the one hand, everything looks spectacular; on the other, the album contains some of the worst ideas ever recorded by the band, however well intentioned they may be. "How long?" Is a song about Los Angeles falling in the ocean and also bearing some sonic tributes to the rap music of the city, including a piano line picking up the DJ Mustard and a spring drum sound reminiscent of DJ Quik's . Koenig is smart, but he's not this clever. Elsewhere, the other two duets with Danielle Haim do not keep the promise of the first match: "Married in a rush to gold" is overloaded and weighed down by an allegory, while "We Belong Together" (a production of Batmanglij ) is a pretty little song with dubious lyrics that unfortunately gives you just want to listen one of the best songs of all time. "Jerusalem, New York, Berlin", closer to him, retains the sense of tranquility of the album but is fatally subscribed. Koenig finishes his short chorus by reciting the title of the song as if he were looking at a list of points.

When Batmanglij left Vampire Weekend, he declared that it was time for his writing and production to proceed autonomously. As a result, Koenig, with a new constellation of collaborators, proved his talent. The father of the bride At first, it can be difficult to be understood – whether by accident or not, many of his best songs have been published as single – but over time, it becomes a world in which it is pleasant to slip, even dominated by the idea of ​​destroying the environment, religion and heartache. Koenig is a survivor and, with the rest of the country still mired in the mud that once driped from his group, he looks to the future. The most surprising song on the album is perhaps "Stranger", sung directly by his girlfriend, Rashida Jones. "Things are going to be strange," the voice of Koenig, the blurred trumpets behind him. "I remember life as a stranger, but things change."