Ok, you’re a year, but what’s a year to a decade?

Once again, it’s time for me to write about my favorite new albums from the past year and make all my friends read about them. If you missed when I did this last year, you can catch up here. I will probably be doing this again next year, too. If you’re riveted by this idea, you can subscribe to this blog, somehow. I get emails sometimes telling me that someone has subscribed, so there must be a way to do it. I can’t personally help you do it though, because I don’t know how. Sorry.

5. Vampire Weekend – Father of the Bride

“I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die”

The Hit: Harmony Hall

Don’t Skip: Unbearably White

It’s baffling that, in 2019, there persists a popular narrative that Vampire Weekend make music for boat shoe-wearing Ivy Leaguers kicking back at a regatta as butlers mill about with trays of mint-garnished cocktails. That may have been a clear (if ironic) part of their aesthetic when the band debuted 12 years ago, but at this point, a full thirty percent of their songs seem to be about the cruel pace at which life slips through our fingers, the perilous search for shelter we all undertake, and how the best you can hope for is to be sat by a warm fire with a loving companion when an angry god inevitably smites you and the city of unrepentant non-believers in which you dwell. More Songs About Vengeance and Wrath would have worked just fine for the title of the veteran indie band’s fourth album. Enter Father of the Bride, a weird, messy, mostly great and mostly recognizably “Vampire Weekend” album that continues to explore themes of aging, death, love, violence, and light while expanding the band’s exotic musical palette and further mystifying its cool-obsessed fans. Virtually everything written during Father of the Bride’s press cycle has compared the reincarnated Vampire Weekend to classic jam bands like The Dead or Phish, both recent personal obsessions of front man and mastermind Ezra Koenig. The problem with those comparisons is that they tend to overlook the airtight songwriting and painstakingly pristine recordings that have always made Vampire Weekend great – Eagles, Blind Melon, and Van Morrison might be better reference points here. This is not a dig at rock’s elder noodlers, but Koenig has staked a reputation for himself as a perfectionist first and a studio rat second, and there’s no t-shirt baggy enough or sandal crunchy enough to hide those tendencies on his fourth full-length.

Father of the Bride opens the way all Vampire Weekend albums do – without introduction, Koenig’s voice dropping right in on beat one. What sets the gorgeous “Hold You Now” apart from previous album-openers is its starkness – unadorned acoustic guitars, seemingly pulled straight from a 70’s Nashville session, pluck and prance around Koenig’s dry vocals – and its directness – two unnamed narrators exchange competing takes on the same event as teeth gnash and voices wail over the imminent nuptials that threaten to rip the two from their doomed affair. The song departs further from precedent by handing one of those roles to Danielle Haim, who turns in VW’s first (but far from final) lead vocal performance by someone other than Koenig. “I can’t carry you forever, but I can hold you now” they each declare, laying the thematic foundation for the 17 tracks to follow. Is this song setting the stage for some grand narrative in the aging rock band’s inevitable concept album? No. Does it mean to introduce us to the titular Bride’s Father? Also no – by all available evidence, the album’s title is intended to conjure little else than the memory of the beloved early 90’s Steve Martin/Diane Keaton film by the same name. Which maybe means the answer to both those questions is “yes”? This sense of duality – a man’s despair at the unraveling of a tryst against his partner’s determination to only look forward; the urgently meaningful against the absurdly meaningless – seems to be the point here, even if the band doesn’t quite drive it home with the aching clarity for which they’ve long been revered.

Discerning listeners could accuse Father of the Bride of hitting its peak too early on the explosive second track “Harmony Hall”, but there’s no denying that it hits its mark dead on. The album’s first single, equal parts “Touch of Grey” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, boils over with tasteful classic rock guitar riffs and thunderous percussion while Koenig’s voice echoes bolder than ever as he sings about wicked snakes and crooked money lenders. Think The Old Testament meets Stomp. “Harmony Hall”, with its choir-hall backing vocals and vibra-slapping production flourishes, beckons to the past in more ways than one. As the chorus reaches its climax, Koenig re-purposes a classic VW lyric from the Modern Vampires of the City standout “Finger Back” – “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die”. In 2013, cast as the fulcrum of Koenig’s masterpiece meditation on existential despair, the line sounded like a tortured plea. Here, it’s a detached statement of fact. Life, as Koenig more or less puts it, goes on. But so, too, does the dread it engenders, however used to it we might get. As Father of the Bride unfolds, it becomes clearer and clearer that this is a statement from a band in transition. It is Very Important to many music journalists that you be aware that Vampire Weekend lost a member to a solo career (producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij) and that Koenig fathered a child (I don’t know its name, google it) in the time since the band released Modern Vampires. You can decide on the extent to which those events impacted the sound of Father of the Bride, (which, in fairness, saw MVOTC co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid return to the boards, hands steady as ever), but the simplest explanation for the band’s sense of wandering is probably the right one – when VW recorded their first album in 2007, the iPhone had yet to be released, and Barack Obama wouldn’t take office for nearly two years. Vampire Weekend, like the characters that inhabit their songs, have grown tired with age and weary with discontent – a Kind Vibe band living in a Harsh Vibe time.

If there’s anything that earns Father of the Bride a lower spot on the podium than the perfect-to-the-last-note trilogy of albums that preceded it, it’s the album’s length – with 18 tracks over its nearly one hour run time, it feels less even than the band’s earlier work, packing some indisputable bangers alongside the mostly interesting if somewhat indulgent musical experiments you might expect from a project billed as a double album following a six year hiatus. On the one hand, tracks like the “Brown Eyed Girl”-nodding “This Life”, or the down-tempo, African-drum-driven “Unbearably White” are classic Vampire Weekend – bursting with melodic perfection and lyrical wit that grow more infectious with every listen. Elsewhere, VW expand the boundaries of their sonic canon with almost entirely sample-based songs like “2021” and “Rich Man”, or the pulsing, blistering flamenco-rock of “Sympathy”. But without the sparse, concrete architecture of albums like Contra or Modern Vampires of the City to hold it up, Father of the Bride starts to sag in places. The Danielle Haim-featuring duets, for example, are less and less effective as the album goes on, culminating in Father of the Bride’s biggest misstep and Vampire Weekend’s first bad song (“We Belong Together”), and the sluggish lounge-jazz of “My Mistake” fails to find the same sense of purpose in which slow-burners like “Taxi Cab” and “Hannah Hunt” flourished before it. But, for all its warts, Father of the Bride serves as one model for how an indie band from the mid-2000’s might thrive in an era that doesn’t need them – by aging with dignity, writing intentionally, and, for once, not taking themselves too seriously. To that end, Koenig delivers Father of the Bride’s thesis statement on “Stranger”, a bombastic dance tune laden with sharp saxophone blurts and jubilant marimba clonks that mark FOTB’s closest brush with pure affirmation. “I used to look for an answer, I used to knock on every door / but you got the wave on, music playing, don’t need to look anymore”. In more than one pre-release interview, Koenig talked about how a revelatory experience at a Kacey Musgraves concert stoked his blossoming interest in writing honest, clearly understandable lyrics (the track does mention partner Rashida Jones’s sister by name). It’s a cute idea, but Koenig, of course, is lying.

For all the wishful thinking about lyrical vulnerability, the contented narrator of “Stranger”, cozied up by the fire, his worries left out in the cold, is no less a fictional character than the madras-clad traveler making his way across the Pakistani border from “M-79”, or the shallow lovers of “Diplomat’s Son”. For an album that seems so sure of itself, the only certainty here is that “things are gonna stay strange”, and by FOTB’s final track, “Jerusalem, New York, Berlin”, Koenig is left cooing alongside a lonely, reverb-drenched synth bass, Haim’s vocals so distant as to imply a departure. “Just think what could have been” Koenig laments, his newfound sense of belonging slashed through once again by bitter resentment. Silly as much of the album may be, Koenig delivers a gut punch in its final moments – “All I do is lose, but baby, all I want’s to win”. And with that, Father of the Bride lands right back where it started – hiding beneath rumpled bed sheets, hoping that the ceaseless tides of change will pass over just this once, but knowing deep down that they can’t. This is ultimately an album about the contradiction in embracing what’s right in front of you while mourning what’s just out of reach. Enlightenment, but not transcendence. Contrition, but not redemption. Sanctuary, but not salvation. On Father of the Bride, Ezra Koenig may finally give the characters of the Vampire Weekend universe the space they need to rest, but he’s smart enough to know that even he can’t save them.