Although Father of the Bride can feel overwhelming at times, you can hear the years of labor that went into it, and it provides a robust start to a new chapter for Vampire Weekend.
From 2008 – 2013, Vampire Weekend were a veritable hit-making machine. For five years, this band of clean-cut, Ivy League-educated New Yorkers dominated airwaves and festivals with their three critically-acclaimed albums, while simultaneously upending the whole “gritty rockstar” persona. Their appeal extended well beyond the indie rock world, drawing in the more casual music-listening masses. Even the most cynical hipsters had to admit they sounded fresh and were damn good. The secret to their success was an unusual combination of 60s pop sounds, African & Caribbean-influenced rhythms, sophisticated and worldly lyrics, and their incredibly inventive use of synthesized organ and harpsichord to create some really original melodies.
Well, about that last part – in 2016, founding member and multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij left the band to go solo, and it’s hard to overstate his role in Vampire Weekend. He wasn’t just the member who played all of the keyboard-based instruments; he also produced their first three albums, wrote some of their lyrics, and even loaned out use of his apartment as a recording space. Batmanglij vowed to keep collaborating with Vampire Weekend in the future, but so far, it’s been hard to imagine the band without him.
Just as you’d expect, Vampire Weekend’s fourth album Father of the Bride sounds significantly different from their first three albums with Batmanglij. It’s noticeably more guitar-driven, it features guest vocalists for the first time, and it’s much longer and denser than anything they’ve done before. Each of its 18 tracks feels like a take on a different style, though there are just as many bookish references peppered alongside shoutouts to contemporary musicians as you’ve come to expect from frontman Ezra Koenig’s lyricism. That said, although Father of the Bride can feel overwhelming at times, you can hear the years of labor that went into it, and it provides a robust start to a new chapter for Vampire Weekend.
While Vampire Weekend have always paid some tribute to a vague collection of retro rock and pop, Father of the Bride spends a surprising amount of time showing off sounds straight out of your parents’ vinyl collection. However, the band does a great job of juxtaposing these throwback moments with today’s music. For instance, “This Life” has the jangle pop guitars that you’d expect from Van Morrison or the Smiths, but its chorus is lifted from the ILoveMakonnen song “Tonight.” “Big Blue” opens and closes with electronic noises, but its midsection has psychedelic guitars that are a spitting image of George Harrison. Then you have the single “Harmony Hall,” which frankly blows everything else out of the water. I might be the thousandth person to say it sounds like Paul Simon, but it really does, even if this comparison has followed the band since their inception. At the same time, the strength of its piano part coupled with its upbeat feeling and Koenig’s vocals make it feel very much like a product of the Vampire Weekend we’ve come to know and love, even if it’s Koenig on the keys rather than Batmanglij this time around. It’s a stellar track, and really is one of their best singles to date.
The most noticeable change between Father of the Bride and Vampire Weekend’s first three albums isn’t just that the absence of the bopping organ and stately harpsichord that distinguished so many of their early singles, but rather the presence of voices other than Koenig. The most ubiquitous of these is Danielle Haim (of HAIM, if you couldn’t guess), who shares lead vocal duties with Koenig on three tracks and appears in the background of another six. Her voice has a certain richness to it, and as a result, the three duets between her and Koenig all have a country music feel to them. It also doesn’t help that “Hold You Now” throws in a pedal steel guitar and “Married in a Gold Rush” has a distinctive twang. In an odd twist, Batamglij co-wrote the last of these three duets, “We Belong Together,” whose heartfelt verses contain few discernable traces of his handiwork beyond slightly amped-up drum beats. How you feel about this set of tracks will depend on how you feel about country flavors in general, but it is a peculiar shift for a band whose aesthetic was always more boat shoes than cowboy boots.
Vampire Weekend has always excelled at making you reach for your search bar, demonstrating their worldliness in way no less overt but arguably less nerdy than the Decemberists. I admit that I didn’t know what a “mansard roof” was until their debut, and had to look up some of the locations listed in Modern Vampires of the City’s “Step.” Father of the Bride is a little more subtle here, although “We Go Together” does blatantly name drop the English poet John Keats and Irish poet W. B. Yeats (which is likely also a reference to the Smiths’ “Cemetery Gates”). The flamenco-like claps and acoustic strumming of the frantic standout track “Sympathy” might make you think the mention of “Diego Garcia” is a nod to an influential Spaniard, but it’s actually an Indian Ocean atoll used as a US military base. The closing piano ballad “Jerusalem, New York, Berlin” is an obvious meditation on Koenig’s feelings about Judaism and Israel, but less obvious is one lyric (“an endless conversation since 1917”) that references the Balfour Declaration, which arguably kicked off the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are few other bands who could pull off this degree of lyrical depth without sounding clumsy, and probably none that sound as cool doing it.
Occasionally, Father of the Bride finds itself a little too overstuffed with ideas, and this is an album where anything “out-there” serves less as an added bit of flair and more of a distraction. The chime of someone (apparently Jenny Lewis) singing “boy” on “2021” makes me glad it’s the shortest track on the album, whereas it might have been a cutesy interlude without it. Similarly, if you can get into the hurried, arpeggiating melody of “Sunflower,” you’re still bound to find the scatting that tries to match this melody a turn-off. Additionally, for an album that takes so much inspiration from the past, the clumsy use of auto-tune really seems out of place. “Bambina” is a quick rocker that’s classic Vampire Weekend, but ends with an a capella auto-tuned refrain that spoils it a bit. On the flip side, “Flower Moon” and “Spring Snow” get off on the wrong foot with overdone vocal effects. While the former has a guest appearance by Steve Lacy (of R&B group the Internet) to redeem it, the latter just stagnates.
I was going to describe Father of the Bride as the type of album that would make a great gateway for getting your parents into Vampire Weekend. Then I remembered that a lot of Vampire Weekend’s earliest fans are probably parents themselves now, and that what is considered “dad rock” will soon come full circle. As a release, it’s not going to upend the indie scene like their debut did, and Koenig doesn’t even care if his band are super “relevant” anymore. However, it will probably upend what you expect from Vampire Weekend, from its even more wholehearted embrace of classic rock to its flirtations with country. Fortunately, Father of the Bride’s upheaval doesn’t come at the cost of its strength as an album, and it’s one hell of a new beginning for Vampire Weekend.
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