“Copper goes green, steel beams go rust,” muses Ezra Koenig on 2021, a track contemplating the passage of time on Vampire Weekend’s fourth album, Father of the Bride. It has been six long years since the band’s last outing, the feted Modern Vampires of the City, which drew to a close a triptych of albums that found this group of Columbia University graduates cleverly fusing west African guitars and uptight east coast stylings.
The working title for the new record was Mitsubishi Macchiato – a parody, almost, of this guitar outfit’s signature metropolitan wit. But Father of the Bride is a summary that feels earned for the band’s return. Much of this generous 18-track double album – from the opener Hold You Now, with its prenuptial vignette, through to Married in a Gold Rush – riffs on love, weddings and churches. It’s an album that exudes warmth and no little sonic familiarity, while reflecting what is a radically altered set-up.
Koenig is now paired-up, the father of a young child and living in Los Angeles, not New York, the city with which Vampire Weekend are heavily associated. A few songs audibly ring these changes. Some harbour paeans to his inamorata, the actor Rashida Jones – such as Stranger, which mentions Jones’s sister Kadida by name, and We Belong Together, a playful, Celtic-digital mashup, which sounds as if Koenig has been listening to early Sophie.
That this record shares its name with a Steve Martin comedy remake is no accident. “I think I take myself too serious,” offers Koenig, mostly to himself, midway through the album. “It’s not that serious.”
Koenig proves to be an unreliable narrator on that count, however. Hiding within these easy-going, often outright beautiful pieces of music are stories about floundering relationships, not successful ones.
There are moneylenders in the temple, and high anxiety at the state of the world; the angst of Modern Vampires of the City has not been expunged. Biblical imagery abounds; there is a gnashing of teeth over wealth, for example, on Rich Man. Sweet and melodic, This Life is a gloriously upbeat Latinate shuffle whose lyric delves deep into the inevitability of suffering. A curveball ending comes in the form of Jerusalem, New York, Berlin, a song that nods towards the Balfour Declaration, which founded the state of Israel. The climate emergency haunts this album’s internal weather. “The rising tide’s already lapping at the gate,” warns Koenig on Flower Moon, just one of a clutch of lyrics where the personal and the global overlap.
Even though bassist Chris Baio, drummer Chris Thompson and Modern Vampires of the City producer Ariel Rechtshaid remain on board, Father of the Bride is effectively a Koenig solo album. Co-founder Rostam Batmanglij left the band amicably in 2016 to pursue other projects, and contributes to a couple of tracks – most audibly Harmony Hall, which shares its name with a Columbia dormitory, its honky-tonk piano with the Rolling Stones and its central lyric – “I don’t want to live like this” - with Finger Back, a track from Vampire Weekend’s previous album. A two-hour loop of Harmony Hall’s guitar melody is up on YouTube: the most fetching of aural wallpapers.
Anyone pining for the youthful breeziness and highlife guitar motifs of this band’s 2008 self-titled debut will punch the air at Father of the Bride’s gentle re-embracing of early influence Paul Simon, and the way the album’s taster – the exceptional Sunflower – involves a kora-like guitar figure from guest star Steve Lacy, on loan from the Internet.
Batmanglij’s seat next to Koenig is filled by an array of such outside collaborators. Mark Ronson lends a hand, as does Ludwig Göransson, the Childish Gambino collaborator and Black Panther supremo.
You could hive off a long standalone EP of the country duets Koenig sings with Danielle Haim, one-third of Haim (and partner of Rechtshaid). It’s a hilarious development: two deeply metropolitan pop auteurs of Jewish descent going whole hog into heartland Americana – a different kind of “unbearably white” (as one song title winks) to the band’s knowingly preppy, collegiate image. The embrace of country music reflects Koenig’s recent desire to write more directly and, perhaps, more sincerely; the result of seeing Kacey Musgraves in concert.
But Father of the Bride is least engrossing when Koenig and co play straight with this genre. Vampire Weekend have always been their most inspiring when blending two notionally disparate elements – their Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa tendency.
Would that there were more tracks like Sympathy, which sets off at a twanging gallop, a little Mexican, a bit chorale. Two of the album’s very greatest hits are its odd ones out. One is 2021 – a pristine digital slow jam, which marries the hyper-produced twang of guitar with aerated electronics and a sample from Haruomi Hosono of Yellow Magic Orchestra. The other, My Mistake, is its very opposite: a collage of watery found sounds, jazz and regret that feels rougher and looser, a truly novel place for this evolving band to be.
