While many will remember 2019's Father of the Bride as a divisive release, there was never a time when Vampire Weekend were universally beloved artists. It's probably important to remember that. From the moment the Ivy League freshmen in brightly colored polo shirts hopped over the hill, they pondered the architectural details they'd claimed to be musical Marmite. And given that the essence of this fifth full-length is drawn entirely from their past songs, the swooping piano stabs and thrusts that characterize their self-titled debut and “Contra” , rolling drum fills. With all the warmth, introspection, and indebtedness to hip-hop that permeates Modern Vampires of the City, it's hard to imagine that Only God Was Above Us will be the record that silences the haters.
But it's a rich, textured record that oozes warmth. It's full of painstakingly crafted layers of sound that are clearly intricately detailed, but they never sound laborious. A playful fragment of flipped tape seems like the beginning of a subtly shuffling “Classical,” while “Capricorn” builds like a skyscraper, one wild noise after another, It contrasts with the pleasant-sounding hook, “You don't have to try.” A trademark piano motif swoops in on “Connect,” while an organ burbles beneath it with both a buoyant double bass and intermittent synth notes. The hazy, melancholy “The Surfer” combines a hip-hop rhythm section with swirling, dreamy strings and a late-'60s psych-like guitar line. All the while, it just sounded like Vampire Weekend.
The record's double highlight, and perhaps the part that might make cynics flip out, is a real gem. First up, “Gen-X Cops” is a ferocious slice of urgent noise-pop that contrasts twitchy piano with pleasantly evocative guitar, and is at once earworm-simplistic. It's also hilariously insensitive (what does “each generation has its own apology” mean anyway?) and why does it bother me? ). Next, increase the contrast level, if a little less immediatly, to “Mary Boone” (itself a staple of Vampire Weekend as a niche reference to New York City, the self-styled Martha Stewart of the art world, but she (was jailed for tax evasion in 2019) over the instantly familiar, down-to-earth, sampled beat of Soul II Soul's “Back To Life (How Do You Want Me).” offers an increasingly disconcerting baroque choral contribution. If you're trying out samples for the first time, it's best to make it classic.
So Only God Was Above Us, which takes all the wide-eyed playfulness of their earlier work and the confidence of creating a sonic tapestry of the latter, is their most accomplished and most vampy yet.・It became The Weeknd's album.