Vampire Weekend Reinvents Its Sound (Again) With Only God Was Above Us: Album Review

Posted by Reinaldo Massengill on Friday, July 19, 2024

A major problem with early success is getting past it — case in point, the cheerful bop of Vampire Weekend’s first two albums and their image as peppy college boys who’d studied Paul Simon’s “Graceland” like a James Joyce masters’ thesis, playing their jaunty global pop to deliriously skanking millennials at seemingly every music festival of the latter aughts. And although that take was understandable — if unfairly reductive — at the time, VW is now a very different band. “Only God Was Above Us” — their first album in nearly five years and just their second in the last decade — finds them bringing their vast musical pedigree to create a sound that they’ve touched on in the past but never previously explored so thoroughly.

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That sound is an unusual fusion of baroque-esque grandeur — first aired on their 2013 song “Step” — and punky energy that’s in full display on this album’s first song, “Ice Cream Piano.” On it, a string quartet jars against a comically distorted, shrieking guitar — and throughout the album, such disparate elements are often playing at the same time. It still sounds unmistakably like Vampire Weekend — the band has become increasingly singer-songwriter-guitarist Ezra Koenig’s vehicle (especially since cofounder Rostam Batmanglij left in 2016), and the songs all are built around his effortlessly memorable melodies and deceptively plaintive voice. But the context for them is what’s different.

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Where 2018’s “Father of the Bride” sprawled 18 tracks across an hour, this one is shorter and tighter: just 10 songs, all fully realized and intensely arranged and, as usual, filled with New York-centric lyrics (although the group has been based in Los Angeles for years). The collaboration of Koenig and his primarily musical foil, co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Haim, Adele, Solange, Madonna, Charli XCX), which has developed over the band’s last three albums, is at a new peak, with sophisticated, scale-vaulting hooks and constantly shifting arrangements; the perky bounce of their early material, which made a couple of cameos on “Father of the Bride,” is nowhere to be found. Yet where that album’s songs were largely guitar-based, it seems that Koenig spent much of the pandemic honing his piano playing: It’s at the forefront of many of the tracks here, which are filled with wildly cascading arpeggios and mellifluous melodies; he’s either gotten a lot better or some very skillful editing took place.

Of course, it’s Vampire Weekend, so the album is academic and heady. Koenig recently told the New York Times about the “patron saints” of the group’s albums (not surprisingly, Paul Simon was the first) and spoke of how this one’s songs conceptually detail “a journey from questioning to acceptance, maybe to surrender. From a kind of negative worldview to something a little deeper” (OK, dude). But what is actually more engaging is the way that same headiness manifests itself musically: There’s tons of ear candy for music geeks here. “Prep School Gangsters” opens with the riff from the Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl”; there’s a hilarious “Goldfinger”-esque brass section on “The Surfer,” wild vocal effects on “Pravda” and a creepy kids’ choir on “Mary Boone” that’s followed immediately by a driving beatbox accompanied by a string quartet. And on the closing “Hope,” the signature hook is played twice on a piano’s high notes, then by a troupe of oboes on the third time round. These are things that only occur to obsessives who’ve spent hours debating, say, exactly how much reverb should be on the drums in that four-second passage on the second chorus.

But it would all be beautiful window dressing without Koenig’s assured sense of melody and distinctive but deceptively versatile voice (check the octave vault on “Prep School Gangsters”). He knows his art and craft — when to let a line just hang, and when to embellish with a harmony or a playful countermelody. And if it all sometimes seems a bit too clever, he’ll show that he’s in on the joke or is at least aware of it — a prominent, repeated line on “Gen X Cops” is “Each generation makes its own apology.” No apology necessary: “Only God Was Above Us” is an essential chapter in the band’s still-evolving sound and career.

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