EGN NEWS DESK
From the primary seconds of Vampire Weekend’s new album, “Only God Was Above Us,” it’s clear that one thing has modified. “Ice Cream Piano” begins with hiss, buzz, suggestions and a hovering, distorted guitar observe — the other of the clear pop tones which were the band’s hallmark. It’s the start of an album filled with startling adjustments and wild sonic upheavals, all packed into 10 songs.
The new album, like all of Vampire Weekend’s work, is meticulous, self-conscious and awash in musical and verbal allusions — generally direct, generally cryptic. But it’s additionally a broad pendulum swing from its 2019 launch, “Father of the Bride,” a leisurely, jam-band-influenced sprawl that ran almost 58 minutes. “Only God Was Above Us,” the group’s fifth album, due April 5, is eight songs and 10 minutes shorter.
“With each album we’ve to push in two instructions directly,” Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend’s singer and first songwriter, mentioned in a current interview. “Sometimes meaning we’ve to be poppier and weirder. Maybe with this document, it’s about each pushing into true maturity, by way of worldview and perspective, but in addition pushing again additional into playfulness. There’s a youthful amateurishness together with a few of our most formidable swings ever.”
Koenig, 39, described the brand new album’s sequence of songs as “a journey from questioning to acceptance, perhaps to give up. From a form of destructive worldview to one thing a bit deeper.” Ultimately, he mentioned, the LP is optimistic. “It’s not a doom and gloom document. And even when there’s songs the place the narrator is making an attempt to determine one thing out or feels confused, that’s not all. That’s a part of the story — it’s not the thesis of the album that the world is darkish and horrible.”
The album additionally exults in musical zingers, non sequiturs and startling off-grid eruptions. The songs typically morph by way of a number of adjustments of tempo and texture, riffling unpredictably by way of indie-rock austerity, orchestral lushness, pop perkiness and hallucinatory digital studio concoctions, just like the cascade of wavery, overlapping piano traces in “Connect.” Where “Father of the Bride” had a folky openness, “Only God Was Above Us” is filled with concepts that gleefully collide.
Ever analytical, Koenig mused that Vampire Weekend’s albums every mirrored patron saints. He named Paul Simon for the band’s self-titled 2007 debut, Joe Strummer and Sublime for “Contra” from 2010, Leonard Cohen for “Modern Vampires of the City,” and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, together with Phish, for “Father of the Bride.” The new album, he mentioned, might mirror a short-lived tour he didn’t get to see: the 1997 pairing of Rage Against the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan, which reached the duvet of Rolling Stone.
“Distortion, heaviness, hardness,” Koenig mentioned. “We have been drawn towards these qualities on this document in a extra direct manner than ever earlier than.”
Koenig spoke through video from his dwelling in Los Angeles. Behind him — from the gathering of his spouse, the actress Rashida Jones — was a wall of images by the artist Taryn Simon from the venture “Contraband”: bootleg DVD boxed units that have been confiscated by United States Customs, arrayed in Minimalistic formations. Like Vampire Weekend’s songs, they neatly body disruptive materials.
Vampire Weekend has all the time had two distinct facets — its fastidious album work and its frisky reside reveals — and will quickly have three. (More on that later.) The central one is the music the band constructs within the studio, which is minutely tweaked and painstakingly thought-about. Vampire Weekend’s songs uphold a long-established custom of concise pop songwriting. But even because it delineates clear verses and choruses, the band pushes each different parameter.
“With some forms of artwork, you in all probability need to put a whole lot of thought into the best way to create layers of which means,” Koenig mentioned. “Songs are, by their nature, comparatively brief. They have repetitive hooks. Then if you wish to go maximalist and fill it with manufacturing particulars and preparations, you possibly can. And if you’d like the lyrics to push out into some bizarre place, you possibly can.”
Yet the fundamentals of pop songwriting preserve the band’s experimentation grounded. “You can zig and zag from verse one to verse two to verse three, however you retain coming again to the identical refrain,” he added. “But now it’s recontextualized by the second verse. I believe all that stuff is constructed into the format. It’s this nice populist artwork kind the place you will get actually on the market however the construction holds it collectively.”
Beginning with the 2013 album “Modern Vampires of the City,” Vampire Weekend’s studio output has more and more been a collaboration between Koenig and the producer and multi-instrumentalist Ariel Rechtshaid, who has labored on hits with Madonna, Usher, Haim and others.
“I’ve been a part of making issues that sound costly and delightful,” Rechtshaid mentioned in a video interview from his Los Angeles studio. “But on this document, when the songs have been at a sure stage, we have been simply, like, ‘This sounds thrilling to us.’ It wasn’t a gimmick. It wasn’t like, ‘Here’s the choice to make one thing that feels noisy or soiled or distorted.’ It’s that the songs have been emoting correctly.”
The band and Rechtshaid have been engaged on — and transforming — a lot of the new album’s songs since 2020. Two tracks, “Gen-X Cops” and “The Surfer,” originated a lot earlier. The untamed slide-guitar line of “Gen-X Cops” got here from Brooklyn periods in 2012, whereas “The Surfer” consists of much-altered components of a music Koenig had begun writing with Rostam Batmanglij, who left Vampire Weekend in 2016.
“Sometimes you get fortunate and the music, the manufacturing, the lyrics and the efficiency all come collectively and it matches on the document you’re engaged on,” Koenig mentioned. “And generally, there’s one thing particular about it, however it’s a must to put it apart and simply let time do its factor.”
Although Vampire Weekend’s members have settled in Los Angeles, its new album is suffused with ideas of Twentieth-century New York City. Those have been the a long time earlier than Vampire Weekend obtained began at Columbia University in 2006. “Weird, half-baked recollections and photos and ideas and household historical past,” Koenig mentioned. “That’s the model of New York that’s floating by way of this document.”
The opening tracks ponder battle and disillusionment. “Classical” finds bitter energy struggles hidden in historical past, noting “how the merciless turns into classical in time.” In “Connect,” the singer wonders, “Is it unusual I can’t join?,” mingling the non-public and the net. The album finally concludes with “Hope,” the longest music in Vampire Weekend’s catalog, a stately, eight-minute litany of disasters and injustices — “The sentencing was overturned/The killer freed, the courtroom adjourned” — with a guardedly reassuring chorus: “I hope you let it go.”
The album title comes from a New York Daily News headline proven within the album’s cowl {photograph}, which was shot by Steven Siegel in 1988 at a subway graveyard, inside a subway automobile turned sideways — a picture that appears surreal however wanted no particular results. One music, “Mary Boone,” borrows the identify of the SoHo gallery proprietor who was massively influential within the Eighties.
Another, “Prep-School Gangsters,” is called after a 1996 story in New York journal about privileged college students dabbling within the drug commerce. “The prep-school gangster — these are the individuals who run the overwhelming majority of establishments,” Koenig mentioned. “It’s very attainable, particularly in America, particularly in New York, that every so often the prep-school gangster’s grandfather was as soon as the deprived youth, and that the deprived youth’s grandson would be the prep-school gangster. And right here they’re on this transient second of time, assembly collectively.”
“The Surfer” begins with a reference to “Water Tunnel 3,” a venture to convey water to New York City from a reservoir in Yonkers. It has been underneath development since 1970 and is much from full.
“There’s that eerie however lovely feeling that beneath this, probably the most populous metropolis in America, there may be an nearly century-long venture occurring, the place individuals are burrowing by way of the Earth,” Koenig mentioned. “And then, traditional New York stuff that everyone needs to speak about, the bagels and the pizza — it’s so good due to the water. Where does the water come from? It comes from upstate New York, distant. How does it get into anyone’s faucet on the Lower East Side?
“It’s all the time been a slight obsession of mine,” he continued. “I like that concept in regards to the underground. I don’t imply culturally. I imply simply actually what’s underground.”
Vampire Weekend will quickly be resurfacing to tour — a job far faraway from the band’s finely detailed studio work. Real-time performing was a fraught prospect for such a perfectionist group. “I’d hear different musicians discuss, ‘Oh man, , touring is hard, however then when you get onstage, all of your worries go away and also you’re simply connecting with the viewers,’” Koenig recalled. “And I’d assume, ‘What are these individuals speaking about? That’s when the concerns begin.’”
For its 2019 tour, Vampire Weekend expanded its stage lineup to seven musicians and vocalists, opening up extra potentialities within the songs and relieving a number of the virtuosic pressures. “Now, once we get collectively to rehearse, there’s a youthful, playful vibe,” Koenig mentioned. “We’re all the time arising with concepts that make us giggle.” The full band has been working towards since November for a summer season tour it can preview on April 8 — performing a noon live performance in Austin within the path of the total photo voltaic eclipse and sharing a free livestream.
Along with recording and touring, Vampire Weekend might quickly unveil a 3rd side. Chris Baio, the band’s bassist, and Chris Tomson, its drummer, did separate video interviews from the studio area they share in Los Angeles — a transformed medical workplace the place Vampire Weekend began assembly in summer season 2020 for weekly, Covid-distanced jam periods, taking part in in separate rooms and recording a whole bunch of hours of music.
“The world had stopped working and a whole lot of what we usually do was simply not being finished,” Tomson recalled. “There was one thing about simply taking part in with no expectation — to only play with my two very shut associates with out an agenda.”
Baio mentioned, “It’s very uncommon for individuals in a band of our dimension to be alone collectively. No engineer, no tour manager, nothing like that. It felt like being on the outset of the band once more. And we did that for 3 years and alter, each time we have been all on the town.”
Those periods might result in the emergence of a brand new trio that occurs to have the identical members as Vampire Weekend, performing unreleased materials.
“We form of have an imaginary again story for that band,” Koenig added. “It was a band that got here out round 1989, 1990, and so they have been a bit bit too punky for the jam scene and a bit bit too jammy for the punk scene. And there’s a bit little bit of the Minutemen in there. The fact is, that is very untimely as a result of that band continues to be hashing out its sound. I don’t wish to say an excessive amount of.”
Could the unnamed trio open reveals on Vampire Weekend’s tour? “That has been mentioned,” Koenig mentioned dryly.
“We’re simply making an attempt to create a sound that we’ve by no means fairly heard earlier than,” he had famous earlier. “That’s what retains us going.”
