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Ezra Koenig begins Solely God Was Above Us talking, it appears, to only one particular person. Towards a blur of amplifier hum and a tentative guitar strum, he sounds skinny and reedy, virtually petulant, a bit bit doomy. “‘Fuck the world,’” Koenig sings softly, “You mentioned it quiet/Nobody might hear you/Nobody however me.”
This hushed distortion opens Vampire Weekend’s fifth album, the place Koenig and his bandmates, Chrises Baio and Tomson, gaze longingly on the previous to search out extra questions than solutions. A chief concern is historical past, and the place to suit inside it, however, finally, Vampire Weekend itself is the main focus of Solely God Was Above Us. It’s the band’s most overtly self-referential launch, a collage of signature sounds and motifs dotted with allusions. It feels new and comfy, repeatedly elegant and charming, calm and comforting, and, at instances, foreboding. And only a bit frightened.
That is to say that Solely God Was Above Us can also be essentially the most trustworthy album Vampire Weekend have made, an encapsulation of what the band does finest, melodic and abstruse in Koenig’s personal masterful method. Take the 2 apparent callbacks on “Join,” which recreates Tomson’s “Mansard Roof” drum fill and matches in keyboards that recall to mind Contra’s runaway hit “Vacation.” The music is a vigorous reverie about misplaced days in New York, however barely askew in its reminiscences and temper. Koenig and co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid seize the strangeness with a observe that takes the signature Vampire Weekend sounds and twists them to be a bit jazzy, typically a bit digital, a beat away from melting down totally. The result’s one thing like indie deja vu, the sense that we’ve heard this earlier than however can’t in any respect place it.
Although the band members themselves have lengthy lived in Los Angeles, New York nonetheless looms giant for Vampire Weekend. Koenig, Baio, and Tomson all grew up in or across the metropolis and, with ex-bandmate however present contributor Rostam Batmanglij, famously coalesced at Columbia College. Being away from New York, nevertheless, provides a brand new perspective: From a distance, town seems as a decaying large, inescapably beholden to its previous and all of the ghosts who’ve handed by. Just by naming New Yorkers of previous—the late Russian-born journalists Henry and Ludmilla Nikitina Shapiro, their daughter, Irina Shapiro Corten, the famed gallery proprietor Mary Boone, even a defunct tie store—Koenig’s always-vibrant world of name-drops observes the strangeness of dwelling in huge shadows.
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