Vampire Weekend's 'Only God Was Above Us' Review
’s recordings have frequently been characterized by a kind of tidiness, a clean fusion of Ezra Koenig’s pop songwriting smarts and the group’s instrumental economy. The band’s new albumwith a decided bent toward experimentation and surprising, often harsh, new textures. The results showcase a band that, nearly two decades in, is willing to issue a challenge to its fans and produce a soundtrack for a reality that is teeming with noise and discord.
Opening song “Ice Cream Piano” announces itself with lo-fi buzz and then repeatedly shifts in tempo before winding out its final vamp as one of the noisiest things they’ve ever produced. The single “Classical” has a rave-style breakbeat and distorted curlicues of electric guitar, but still manages to convey a feeling of lushness with some alternating atonal/pretty stabs of piano and free-jazz saxophone.
Koenig’s keen sense of song structure remains a fixture, anchoring these compositions from drifting too far off into weirdness. The languid groove of “Capricorn” comes bathed in reverb and takes a dub-like approach to mixing, as instrumental accompaniment drops in and out without warning, but Koenig’s major-key chorus is as instantly hummable as it is empathetic. “Too old for dying young, to young to live alone/Sifting through centuries for moments of your own,” he sings.
As ever, Koenig’s lyrics are dense with allusions — obscure bits of New York history, relatives in foreign lands, and sandhogs working in underground tunnels. But there’s also a sense of reckoning with the past and the present. “Classical” and “Ice Cream Piano” both reference how power can normalize inhumanity or bestow unearned privilege on future generations. “We’re all the sons of vampires who drank the old world’s neck,” Koenig sings at one point.
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