please feed the vampires
please feed the vampires
unpacking the new Vampire Weekend album
Sharing my thoughts on Vampire Weekend’s newest album. Listen with me and let me know what you think!
Vampire Weekend’s fifth studio album and its first since 2019, Only God Was Above Us, is a richly thematic and beautifully crafted exploration of youth, loss, and the power of nostalgia. Its name and cover art are taken directly from a Steven Seigel photograph of a subway rider reading the May 1, 1988 edition of the Daily News, featuring a quote from a woman who survived Aloha Airlines Flight 243, which lost its roof midair.
“I looked up. Only God was above us.”
Unwilling to put even the band’s logo over what he felt was a perfect image, Vampire Weekend lead singer Ezra Koenig decided it would be the cover art and, therein, the name of the record.
As a whole, the album leans heavily into themes of youth and the loss thereof, the haunts of our memories, and the mythologization of the past.
The record opens up with, “Fuck the world,” the gentle start of “Ice Cream Piano,” a song which satisfies every part of the rocker’s heart. Koenig sings, “We’re all the sons and daughters of vampires who drank the old world’s necks,” and we get the first showcase of how strong the string parts of this record will be. The rest of the album ensues in an equally impressive and effective instrumental showcase, and each part is as enjoyable as the last. The song is a take on the lyrics, “In dreams, I scream piano, I softly reach the high note. The world don’t recognize a singer who won’t sing.”
“Classical” is a song about empire. “How the cruel, with time, becomes classical.” What lasts after the revolution? What remains?
The questions continue on “Capricorn,” when we remember a time “God was on your side” – and how the “world looked different” then. This track contains tightly knit string sections and a rather tidy arrangement overall that fills the sonic space without wiggle room. And with excellent saxophone parts. “Too old for dying young, too young to live alone.” The music video, directed by Nick Harwood, is above.
“Connect” is a song inspired by Koenig’s father, who for a time worked as a tunnel inspector in New York City. This song reminded me of “Rhapsody in Blue” before I even read that Koenig had described this track to NPR as a “psychedelic Gershwin.” By this point in the album, we’re well exposed to the production quality of these songs, and the chorus of this song is such an earworm that it’s a treat. The band shines in this song – Ezra’s piano is clear like a Broadway song, accompanied by full the drums of Chris Tomson and Ariel Rechtshaid and a deep bass by Chris Baio.
The first chords of “Prep-School Gangsters” reset our ears for the second half of the album, which is equally as adventurous and wayfaring as the first. Vampire Weekend hits the nostalgic notes in this one – it reminded me of the sound of the early 2000s. “Somewhere in your family tree, there was someone just like me,” returns us to the lore of whatever story or world we’re in the middle of – ours, his, theirs, whoever’s.
The next character in our tale is “The Surfer,” who lives in a song with mysterious, warm, summery hints of the 70s. This is a track that blew my mind. It’s not inherently sad at all, but it delivered me nearly to tears at the first listen. My heart was torn open by the reaching, siren-like horns alone, and paired with the devastating lyrics – “The surfer can’t forget the shells around his neck - but you were born beneath fluorescent lights, you’ve never seen a starry night” – I found myself truly moved by what I feel is a cinematic song more than anything else.
Luckily, there’s no time to be emotional, because “Gen X Cops” rips on electric right away. This song gets its name from a 1990s Hong Kong police drama and has the ska roots of “A-Punk” and “Cousins.” Alone, by any other band, this song would melt, and from Vampire Weekend, it’s killer.
“Mary Boone” should be studied in songwriting classes. Mary Boone was a real person – she opened her namesake gallery in 1977 and was a prominent figure in the SoHo art scene until her highly-publicized conviction of tax evasion in 2019. The song is sung to her. To NPR, Koenig said, “I kind of pictured the person who wants to make it, the person who comes to the city, literally or metaphorically, looking for a way in. And this idea of the person looming on the dark side of a room - it felt kind of rich to me.” “Mary Boone” features a sample from British R&B song “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me),” a song written about a near-death experience had by Soul II Soul’s Caron Wheeler.
The chorus on this song eventually opens up like a flower, and your heart just soars with it. I loved the performance on The Daily Show on Wednesday night.
On “Pravda,” Koenig asks, “I wonder if they’ll wait a while to clear away my crocodile,” referencing the Lacoste tag he graffitied onto Ruggles Hall – down the street from Grant’s Tomb – when he was a student at Columbia University. As of this year, the crocodile is still there. The word pravda does mean truth in Russian, but it was also the name of the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The album closes with the record’s longest track, an eight-minute epic called “Hope.” There is nothing like this song in any of Vampire Weekend’s existing discography. This was a pessimistic song, Koenig said himself, and invokes tropes of subtle horror (“the call is coming from inside”) – but repeats, “I hope you let it go. I hope you let it go. Our enemy’s invincible – I hope you let it go.” I felt this song touched on a number of conspiracy theory-sounding tropes, and loved that one of the repeating lines, “enemy’s invincible,” sometimes sounds like “enemy’s invisible,” furthering that sense of conspiracy and mystery.
I found this album to reach new heights for Vampire Weekend in terms of lyrics and sonic world-building, and loved each heavenly instrumental moment the band provides. The band performed some songs on Koenig’s 40th birthday, the day of the solar eclipse, from the Moody Amphitheater in Austin, Texas – directly in the path of totality.