Elegantly Wasted
On a complex and self-referential new album, Vampire Weekend wrestles with age and compromise. Plus, St. Vincent goes back to basics.
Vampire Weekend - Only God Was Above Us
On their arresting new album Only God Was Above Us, Vampire Weekend offers a bewitching song, “The Surfer,” inspired by New York’s Water Tunnel 3. Designed to bring water from upstate into the heart of Manhattan, the subterranean structure has been in progress since 1970, making it the world’s longest-running uncompleted construction project. In true Vampire Weekend form, it’s a crisp and exacting image, refracting and enriching the album’s entangled themes.
It could be said that each of Vampire Weekend’s albums is built upon layers of underground meaning, systems of interconnected images and reference points that beg for excavation. This has never been truer than on their fifth, which raids their back catalog for musical quotations, sampling old riffs and drum fills, inverting familiar melodies, recontextualizing turns of phrase from beloved Vampire Weekend songs of old. In their own way, the band has created an intricate mythology not unlike Taylor Swift’s— but where her album-filling Easter eggs tend to be rooted in persona and lore, Vampire Weekend’s are largely sonic.
The album’s labyrinthine density is just one of the ways in which Only God Was Above Us draws inspiration from Water Tunnel 3. It is also an album that is explicitly about New York in particular, and about time-ravaged institutions in general. After convening at Columbia University, the members of Vampire Weekend decamped to Los Angeles, where they’ve spent the better part of their adult lives. This album returns their attention to the city of their youth, viewing it now through the eyes of experience, open not just to the romance and mythology of the city but to all of its imperfections, promises left unfulfilled or incomplete.
You can hear this dynamic echoed in the music itself. All those reference points are here as reminders of the band’s signature aesthetic, signifiers of the peppy ska-punk sound on which they made their name— only here, what once sounded crisp and clean is caked in a few layers of mud and debris. The sound of Only God Was Above Us could never be confused for anyone but Vampire Weekend, yet this is also the noisiest and scuzziest record they’ve ever made: Listen to the thrum of distortion that opens “Ice Cream Piano,” or the skronking sax that wails through the background of “Classical” like a police siren weaving through traffic.
That’s not to say that the band has lost their affinity for beautiful textures or careful arrangements. “Capricorn” attests to their skill at pristinely-orchestrated pop— though even here, singer Ezra Koenig croons from behind a thin wall of fuzz. “Prep-School Gangsters” has a bright, chiming guitar riff that would have been the envy of the 1980s college rock scene, decked out in orchestral trills.
Still, there is no denying that this is a grungier incarnation of Vampire Weekend, built from unearthed components coated in rust and debris. “The Surfer” opens with a gritty hip-hop beat, evidently something that’s been sitting in the Vampire Weekend archive for years now. The band gives it a polish, but not so much as to obscure its weather-beaten feel. They are reckoning with their own history, quite literally, building something new from familiar parts yet replacing youthful varnish with a patina of age and worldliness.
This reappraisal of vintage Vampire Weekend tropes is the subterranean heart of Only God Was Above Us, watering Koenig’s typically ambitious arrangements and florid lyrics about returning to a city of memory, wondering whether it’s you or it that has changed. In “Connect,” a rambling and episodic highlight, the band ambles down bustling streets accompanied by upright bass and twinkling piano— think of it as a walking tour of New York as led by Dave Brubeck. But cheerful though the song may sound, Koenig acknowledges difficulty reigniting the magical feeling of his youth: “Is it strange I can’t connect?”
And then there’s “Mary Boone,” a song named for a once-iconic New York City art dealer who later became incarcerated over financial fraud. The song is a sung from the perspective of a first-time artist arriving in town to court Boone’s favor, and it emanates empathy for all parties— the supplicant bringing homage to the city’s gatekeeper, and the tragic figure whose fall from grace has itself become part of New York’s complicated and beautiful history.
In fact, one of the album’s major themes is that all of our stories are complicated, all of them filled with beauty and disgrace. That’s another reason for the band’s re-engagement with their own past: Now into the forties, Vampire Weekend is thinking clearly about youthful idealism curdled into middle-aged compromise, and about the role of failure in shaping our lives and legacies.
You can hear it in “Gen-X Cops,” where youthful aspiration is conscripted into the service of a faulty institution, then left to justify its compromised position: “Each generation makes its own apology.” “Capricorn” is more empathetic, gently acknowledging how rigid idealism can be humbled by age: “The world looked different when God was on your side.” In “Prep-School Gangsters,” Koenig acknowledges that every lineage has some complicated and unexplainable chapters. “Classical” considers the same idea through the other end of the telescope, attesting to how acts of barbarism or injustice can be justified over time, explained away as the necessary compromises of empire or civilization: “The cruel, with time, becomes classical.”
All of this leads toward the eight-minute closing song, “Hope,” notable for being the one song on the album without a clear antecedent in Vampire Weekend’s oeuvre. Here, Koenig offers a winding litany of all the earthly injustices that seem impossible to redress, then pronounces a simple benediction: “I hope you let it go.” Maybe this is just Koenig’s generation making its own apology.
Or maybe it is a grace note— an acknowledgement that none of us are made to create a world fully in line with our youthful dreaming, any more than we are made to carry the burden of history and compromise. On Only God Was Above Us, Vampire Weekend honors the spirit of their youth. And, they are gentle with themselves for all the ways they’ve grown out of it.
My rating: 8 out of 10
St. Vincent - All Born Screaming
Ezra Koenig and Co. aren’t the only ones revisiting their back catalog. On a new album called All Born Screaming, Annie Clark— better known as St. Vincent— touches on styles, textures, and sonic signifiers from throughout her discography, creating an album that bears hazy resemblance to her work from the past without ever recalling any one era in particular. As Stereogum’s Ryan Leas notes, it may be the first time in Clark’s history where you could simply say, “It sounds like a St. Vincent album.”
But if All Born Screaming is familiar in its sound, it feels utterly distinct in its spirit. Clark’s music has always had an unknowable, otherworldly quality to it— not for nothing did she title a record Strange Mercy, as if to suggest some alien benevolence intruding upon the mundane. There is nothing strange or extraterrestrial to this new album, which finds Clark trading artful provocation for careful craft.
To put it differently, this may be the first St. Vincent album designed not to jolt, but to reassure. Following the detached sleaze of Daddy’s Home— a piece of 1970s cosplay that felt a bridge too far, even by St. Vincent’s willfully artsy standards— All Born Screaming is a work of course-correction. Clark is returning to her wheelhouse, synthesizing all the strands of her music that have galvanized listeners in the past, offering comfort in the notion that she knows where her strengths lie and is back doing what she does best.
If the self-produced album never shocks or surprises, it does at least contain a number of very good St. Vincent songs. Many of the best are when she engaged most directly with the energy of dance, funk, and industrial music. “Big Time Nothing” bobs along to a glistening club groove, while “Reckless” starts slow but memorably lurches to life with walloping, heavy-machinery drums.
A song called “Broken Man” feels destined to be a live concert staple for the rest of Clark’s professional life, a gloriously glitchy pile-up of gnarled guitar riffs and clattering drums. It’s also representative of the All Born Screaming ethos in more ways than one, sounding faintly like the mutant offspring of Strange Mercy and Masseduction. Dave Grohl drums on the song, as if to inaugurate St. Vincent’s classic rock era, and the gender-inverting lyrics sound like business as usual for a performer whose shape shifting has become de rigueur.
Clark has always been gifted at writing prophetic songs that survey trouble on the outside along with trouble within. All Born Screaming is full of them, not least the noir-ish “Violent Times,” about two lovers forgetting who they are amidst falling bombs and crass materialism. “The Power’s Out” situates democratic collapse in the context of human apathy, borrowing imagery from a classic Arcade Fire song.
In interviews for the album, Clark has noted her desire to make something emotional, interior— a primal howl of an album. That’s a curious framing for All Born Screaming, which may be the most comfortable album she’s ever made— and the most cautious. But after so many albums of Clark trying on new sounds and new faces, as if desperate to figure out who she really is, there are simple pleasures in hearing her rest in the person she’s been all along.
My rating: 7 out of 10
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