Review: Vampire Weekend’s Father of the Bride Is Generous with Its Rewards

There’s still darkness flitting around Ezra Koenig’s consciousness, but it’s more of the “middle-aged malaise” variety.

Father of the Bride
Photo: Monika Mogi

A lot has changed in the world of Vampire Weekend since the band released their last album, Modern Vampires of the City, in 2013. Most significantly, frontman Ezra Koenig’s main songwriting partner, Rostam Batmanglij, announced in 2016 that he was leaving the band. Approaching the release of their fourth album, Father of the Bride, with apprehension, then, would be a reasonable stance. Fortunately, it’s unfounded, as Father of the Bride is overstuffed with the pristine production, sickly sweet melodies, and audaciously off-the-wall genre-bending that’s sustained the band long enough to remain arguably the most commercially relevant of the popular 2000s indie bands that are still standing.

Modern Vampires of the City was nothing short of a quantum leap for Vampire Weekend, possessing a seriousness of purpose and lived-in musicality that made everything the band had done prior sound trite by comparison. Six long years later, one hardly expects Koenig to still be grappling with the same existential dilemmas he did on that album. But absorbed back to back with Modern Vampires of the City, the shift in tone on Father of the Bride is jarring.

There’s still darkness flitting around Koenig’s consciousness, but it’s more of the “middle-aged malaise” variety than the crisis of faith he teased out last time around, and even then the music is so relentlessly sunny that Koenig rarely sounds anything less than content. (It’s telling that the album’s most arresting, confrontational line—“I don’t wanna live like this/But I don’t wanna die” from “Harmony Hall”—is recycled from 2013’s “Finger Back”.) On “This Life,” even as he asks, “Oh Christ, am I good for nothing?” he sounds like a millennial Jimmy Buffet, pondering the question from the comfort of a sonic hammock composed of beachy guitars and effortlessly breezy harmonies. There’s nothing wrong with Koenig achieving this state of mind, of course—in fact, it’s comforting—but if he were a character on a TV show, it would feel as though we missed a few crucial stages of character development.

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Taken on its own terms, however, Father of the Bride is generous with its rewards. The resplendent “Harmony Hall” is Vampire Weekend firing on all cylinders; its sparkling guitar arpeggios, sun-drenched chorus, and baroque piano break are all entirely familiar elements within the band’s oeuvre, but they’ve never coalesced so irresistibly before. And while a certain sense of over-familiarity does pervade some of the album’s lesser tracks (like the white-bred funk trappings and use of Auto-Tune on “How Long?”), others are as inventively irreverent with genre conventions as any of the band’s past work, such as the bluesy finger-picking married to Disney-like orchestral lines on “Rich Man,” or the early-1970s Cali-rock vibes interspersed with jazzy scatting on “Sunflower.” In this anything-goes context, even the appearance of country and folk elements on tracks like “Hold You Now” and “Big Blue” that otherwise might be considered conventional feel quietly bold.

In the near-total absence of Batmanglij—he’s listed as the co-writer and producer of one song and the co-producer of another—Koenig turns to HAIM’s Danielle Haim to find a new foil. She’s game, singing with Koenig and playing three very different kinds of paramours on “Hold You Now,” “Married in a Gold Rush,” and “We Belong Together.” The latter of these has the melodic construction of a beginner fiddle tune and the rhyme scheme of a children’s song and yet remains maddeningly infectious. But she can’t fill one role that seems to have slipped beyond the band’s grasp: editor. At 18 tracks and 58 minutes, Father of the Bride is by far the longest release by a band whose brevity was once one of their best characteristics. This results in a not-insignificant amount of bloat, including at least one or two songs—like the lounge jazz disaster “My Mistake”—that should have been left in the outtakes pile.

But Koenig is clearly in no mood for compromise. He’s not shy about putting all this new material out there, or about confronting his critics in the process. Lyrics like “I’ve been cheating my way through this life/And all its suffering” (on “This Life”) and “One rich man in ten has a satisfied mind/And I’m the one” (on “Rich Man”)—not to mention the title, if not the content, of “Unbearably White”—seem designed to provoke the authors of the slate of circa-2010 think pieces about Vampire Weekend, appropriation, and white privilege. He doesn’t much seem to care if his words piss you off, as he seems to be feeling pretty good regardless.

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 Label: Columbia  Release Date: May 3, 2019  Buy: Amazon

Jeremy Winograd

Jeremy Winograd studied music and writing at Bennington College, where he did his senior thesis on Drive-By Truckers. He has written for Rolling Stone and Time Out New York. He and his wife met on a White Stripes message board.

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