From the beginning, Vampire Weekend were winners: charming, relatively lighthearted; Columbia students one year, festival headliners the next. They had cute sweaters and smart jokes; they wrote with wit and curiosity about the tapestry of privileged life; they carried themselves with an almost infuriating sparkle. But they were also manic, weird, and provocatively cross-cultural, mixing up digital dancehall and string sections, Latin punk and raga in ways that didn’t quite fit. And despite their superficial politeness, there was something deeply antagonistic about them, the vestigial bite of suburban kids who grew up loving punk and hardcore but never quite felt entitled to its anger, the indie-rock band bent on breaking up the monopoly rock held over guitar-based music.
In time, they grew bigger, denser, more serious. Their third and last album, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, felt almost haunted, every line crammed with allusion, every space stuffed with weird, processed sounds. Even the silences crackled with old life, a poster on a city street stripped away to reveal the fragment of poster underneath. It felt, appropriately, like the band’s then-home of New York, a place where you can’t take a walk around the block without feeling like you’re bothering the dead.
Frontman Ezra Koenig relocated to Los Angeles, made an animated series for Netflix (Neo Yokio) and became a parent; Rostam Batmanglij—the band’s Swiss Army knife and in-house producer—worked with Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX, leaving Vampire Weekend in 2016 to work on solo music; the band has lived inside a pregnant pause. Now we have Father of the Bride—a looser, broader album than Modern Vampires, the great sigh after a long holding of breath. There are still moments of conflict, but in general, you get the sense the band is just relieved to have run the gauntlet of their existential doubts and come out relatively unscathed, grateful to be here. A glass of wine? Why not. Make it white, and if you’ve got it, a little ice.
The music (produced again in part by Modern Vampires collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid, with a few cameos by Batmanglij) is accordingly sunny, celebratory, redolent at times of country, ABBA, lounge music (“My Mistake”) and Brazilian jazz (“Flower Moon”) and the barefoot exultations of Van Morrison (“This Life”). Just as indie bands like Pavement cautiously resuscitated the ’70s rock that came before them, Vampire Weekend have resuscitated—or recolonized, you could say—the multicultural boomer sounds of the ’90s, when bands like the Gipsy Kings and the Chieftains moved into the American market, when the Indigo Girls and Rusted Root helped constellate a folksy alternative to the punk-derived sound of “alternative music.”
In the past, the band tended to rely on unusual juxtapositions; here they present their sound more like a compilation, a set of cultural presets calibrated to induce nostalgia, revulsion, historical reconsideration. (Hey, you, remember Tevas? Peace Frogs? Papyrus?) The message is sincere, but the sound bristles with intellectual awareness, the protection you wear when wading into bad taste. “There’s always been that part of me [where] I see people beating up on something and I just wanna be like, ‘What’s really going on here?’” Koenig said on a recent episode of his online radio show, Time Crisis. For years, Vampire Weekend have implicitly threatened—in their perverse, contrarian, head-of-the-class way—to sound like Phish; Father marks the moment the threat becomes a promise.
For a band historically obsessed by the manmade world, its technology, its culture, and its flood of proper nouns, Father is relatively naturalistic, less reference-heavy and confined to its head. Several of the songs (“Hold You Now,” “Married in a Gold Rush,” “We Belong Together”) are literal duets between Koenig and Haim’s Danielle Haim—the sound not of one person thinking it through but two people hashing it out, of yin slowly reconciling itself to yang. Themes include spring, rebirth, a shedding of old skin, and reclamation of light; at one point, we return to the garden (“Sunflower”); at another, we hear the lullaby of crickets (“Big Blue”).
Of course, the garden—that fertile, innocent place we dwelled before civilization led us astray—is and has always been a fantasy, and home is never home again after one leaves. There are times when the universality of Father of the Bride feels forced, the sound of a restless mind repeatedly telling itself to relax, the paradoxical effort people make in the name of loosening up. Koenig said he wanted to try to write songs where a listener didn’t have to do too much legwork to figure out who might be singing them; to be clear, immediate, to conjure the myth of Ordinary People—you know, like country music.
But Vampire Weekend have never been that legible, nor is being legible any better than being a little obscure. More than anything, Father makes me think of something like Bob Dylan circa Self Portrait and New Morning: The sound of an artist trying to backpedal, in a fascinating, sometimes antagonistic way, on the gravity they had worked so hard to cultivate. “I think I take myself too serious,” guest guitarist Steve Lacy mutters at the beginning of “Sympathy.” “It’s not that serious.” Fair enough, but you can’t say a precedent wasn’t set. Nor could you deny that the song that follows—a violent, gothy piece of flamenco that features a club-jazz breakdown and ends in a hail of heavy-metal drums—is the most absurdly serious piece of music here, and incidentally, one of the best.
Father is the first time they’ve sounded overlong, the first time they haven’t sounded almost incandescently vital, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped moving; if anything, with the exception of “Rich Man”—a lilting nursery rhyme that mixes a Celtic reel with a sample of the amazing Sierra Leonean palm-wine singer S.E. Rogie—the music here is as big of a step away from Modern Vampires as Modern Vampires was from Contra. In tow come the Grateful Dead–style guitar solos (“Harmony Hall”), the summer-camp singalongs (“We Belong Together”), the Beatles-y meditations on cosmic insignificance (“Big Blue”). Exhausted by big questions, they’ve consigned themselves to tiny reminders; once almost comically buttoned up, they have ventured, conditionally, to let it all hang out—a gesture as proportionally life-giving, indulgent, and periodically goofy as you’d expect.
Generally speaking, happiness doesn’t make for great art; at the very least, it isn’t as combustible as misery, desire, or any other feeling rooted in what we lack rather than what we have. Listening to Father of the Bride, I hear songs of contentment sung by people who have tended to feel agitated, songs of belonging by people who have tended to feel as though they don’t belong. I miss the restlessness of Contra, the grandeur of Modern Vampires, the way the band used to sound anxious and self-examining about their privilege but now seem oblivious. Still, it takes a certain kind of bravery to feel the weight of lightness, to admit that things are okay. “I used to freeze on the dancefloor, I watched the icebergs from the shore,” Koenig sings on “Stranger,” “But you got the heat on, kettle screaming/Don’t need to freeze anymore.” Corny, but that’s life sometimes. And with that, the wallflower peels away from the wall and starts to dance.
