Vampire Weekend's recordings have often been characterized by a kind of tidiness, a clean fusion of Ezra Koenig's pop wit and the group's organic economy. The band's new album Only God was above us offers something different, breaking away from the brighter, messier aspects of 2019 Father of the Bride with a decided inclination towards experimentation and surprising, often harsh, new textures. The results show a band that, nearly two decades later, is willing to challenge its fans and create a soundtrack for a reality teeming with noise and discord.
Opener 'Ice Cream Piano' announces itself with a lo-fi buzz, then repeatedly changes tempo before its final vamp ends as one of the noisiest things they've ever produced. Single “Classical” has a rave-style breakbeat and distorted electric guitar riffs, but still manages to convey a sense of opulence with some alternating atonal/beautiful stabs of free-jazz piano and sax. “Mary Boone,” a nod to the famous New York gallerist, lifts the drum from Soul II Soul's “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me),” but adds a towering choral arrangement to boost the beat and the melody.
Koenig's keen sense of song structure remains solid, anchoring these compositions from straying too far into weirdness. The lazy groove of “Capricorn” comes bathed in reverb and takes a dub-like approach to the mix, as the instrumental accompaniment drops in and out without warning, but Koenig's major-key chorus is both gentle and empathetic. “Too old to die young, too young to live alone/Sifting through centuries for moments of your own,” he sings. Similarly, “Connect” features dizzying piano arpeggios that rub against each other and harsh instrumental solos that dance in and out of the mix, but returns faithfully to its oddly hooky, more restrained chorus.
As always, Koenig's lyrics are thick with allusions—dark bits of New York history, relatives in foreign lands, and sandhogs working in underground tunnels. But there is also a sense of reckoning with the past and the present. “Classical” and “Ice Cream Piano” both refer to how power can normalize inhumanity or bestow irresistible privilege on future generations. “We're all sons of vampires who drank down the throat of the old world,” Koenig sings at one point.
Occasionally, as on “Pravda” and “Gen-X Cops,” these lyrics are brought together under crushing noise, rendering them almost incomprehensible from which one would make sense to retreat. At other times, the production choices are sudden and jarring—horns that startle eerie warnings on “The Surfer,” a heavy push of one too many faders on a few other occasions—in ways that distract from what's going on lyrically, which might be part of of the point.
At the end, Only God was above us it comes out with a sense of cautious optimism. The final track “Hope” is almost eight minutes long – epic by Vampire Weekend standards – and combines a wonderful descending piano melody with the recording of Koenig's wrongs. “The enemy is invincible, I hope you let him,” he repeats at every turn. It's a reminder that life is often messy and you have to learn to move on. With Only God was above usVampire Weekend found the strange beauty in this chaos.
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