Vampire Weekend Makes the Best Pop-Political Album of the Year – National Review

Vampire Weekend lead singer Ezra Koenig performs during the Big Night Out music festival in Singapore in 2013. (Timothy Sim/Reuters)Father of the Bride features the Beltway lyric Wicked snakes inside a place you thought was dignified.

To answer the question: What is the best pop album of 2019?

Its easily Father of the Bride by the impetuously named Vampire Weekend. I commend this album to your attention for the richness of its melodic variety and its surprising emotional and political expression.

You may have given up listening to pop music for being irrelevant, a product of the eras fame-seeking moneygrubbers robotically asserting liberal inanities. But Father of the Brides delight comes from its openly relevant complexities.

In Sympathy, the double albums midway track, this New Yorkbased band put forth its expectations of listeners those Millennial pop fans now at the forefront of the culture who justify the pleasure of their lifestyles by their presumed political awareness. This rumbling dance track is a rubric: While urging fans to dance, it also widens their sense of fellow feeling, a virtue that has been lost in our current political upheaval. But Vampire Weekend brings back sensitivity through musical vibrancy; the erotic-kinetic impulses of dance pop are used as a model for communication what politicians used to call crossing the aisle.

I didnt have your sympathy / But I knew where to start / Explaining to you patiently / That the one who broke my heart / Would have broken yours / And thrown the pieces in the river.

Accompanied by reverberating rhythm, these lyrics explain the political experience that confounds our age: so many aggrieved people feeling unfulfilled and betrayed by past political choices that they no longer identify their national or humane commonality. This dance track releases their frustration and their aspirations. (I take myself too serious / Its not that serious.) What once was an underground or subcult genre offers irresistible expiation via this track thats what pop music is for.

Composer-vocalist Ezra Koenig (age 35) takes the idea of emotional reparation in Sympathy from one of Britains great post-punk bands, New Order, who revolutionized politicized dance pop in the Eighties and Nineties (with such devout political recordings as Temptation, True Faith, and Technique). Here, Vampire Weekend echoes New Orders versatility, rhythmic ingenuity, and its romantic-social undercurrent. Its what, in less fragmented times, was once called folk music but now for an era when the term folk needs to be redefined.

That endeavor gives the 58-minute Father of the Bride its surprise, excitement, and grandeur. Over 18 tracks, Koenig and company work through the sophistication that defeats us, experimenting with assorted song styles plus high-information worldliness without losing the insouciance of their eponymous 2007 debut. Initially known for their preppy eclecticism, Vampire Weekend expands into miscellany as never before. The groups signature audacious Afropop (a cheeky, bright, guitar-based cross-culturalism) blends into melodies that are closer to home and so it seems quirky to audiences who are unaccustomed to what used to be classic and traditional.

While moving forward, Vampire Weekend dares go back to forgotten sounds of American sustenance. Despite the groups flaunted urbanity (promoted as Columbia University graduates, they freely and frequently boast privileged Manhattan indeed cosmopolitan consciousness), Father of the Brides major motif is country-western music. Its an appeal to lost custom and striving.

The opening track, Hold You Now, is, frankly, astonishing. It alternates Koenigs solitary musing on infidelity alongside a woman (singer Danielle Haim) who contemplates her wedding day. Their egotism and remorse over impossible longings dramatize a classic country-western theme. (The male-female harmonies heard across the album improve on Vampire Weekends regular boyishness with vocal richness reminiscent of Fleetwood Macs late-Seventies melodrama on the esoteric double-album Tusk.) But the warring couples verses announce Vampire Weekends modern crisis, especially when contrasted with a Micronesian chorale (actually a sample of Hans Zimmers movie soundtrack The Thin Red Line). From here, theres no telling where the album will go, but its not scattershot. Its musical juxtapositions convey cultural disparity not shallow diversity as well as a spiritual gulf.

Its possible that the cause of Millennial strife is our over-sophistication. Self-righteousness prevents most contemporary pop artists, whether in music or film, from realizing that the nature of their social polarization goes deeper than politics. Vampire Weekend grasps this fundamental problem as initiated in the ex-lovers counterpoint You just watch your mouth / When talkin bout / The father of the bride.

On previous albums, Vampire Weekend repeatedly returned to the quandary of Koenigs ethnic foundation and the source of his identity and moral fealty. This insecurity peeks through some of the bands jauntiest, most unassuming tracks. The disarming M79 pondered racist dreams you should not have in between casual descriptions of class advantages. Not since Public Enemy has an American pop group dared articulate such predicaments. These issues also stymie politicians. Koenig may have supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, but Sanderss mollycoddling platform never approaches the real-life perplexities that Koenig a pop poet sings about.

Koenigs light, boyish vocals are deceptive like Paul Simons keening entreaties that soft-pedaled erudition to both flatter and challenge listeners. I wager that Koenig is, fittingly, more impudent if only from the necessity of taking on this peevish world in his own way. Thats how Father of the Bride breaks through disingenuous politics.

Vampire Weekends songs, which stem from patrilineal culture, are also about its fracture. On This Life, Koenig and a mate sing I been cheatin-on cheatin-on you / You been cheatin-on cheatin-on me / I been cheatin my way through this life / And all its suffering /Oh, Christ /Am I good for nothing? Invoking the deity harkens back to the first tracks confession-and-liturgy. In addition to being a record with political aspects, Father of the Bride deals with religion as, ultimately, a moral exploration.

Vampire Weekend most notably pursued this religious question on 2013s Finger Back (a song about intermarriage), where the line I dont want to live like this / But I dont want to die first appeared, announcing Koenigs sociopolitical-ethnic position. Finger Back was a quasi-rap, daring the most outrageous social proposition since Public Enemys interracial satire Pollywanacracka.

Father of the Brides delicately moving closing track, New York, Jerusalem, Berlin spells out modern Jewish paradox in an increasingly non-orthodox world. This may partly account for the Sanders fixation, but other tracks test its practicality. On Sympathy, Koenig explains Judeo-Christianity / I never heard the words / Enemies for centuries until there was a third . . . / Cause I was looking in the mirror. For all his poetic undertakings, Koenig never stops self-examination. Father of the Bride charts an Every Millennial journey to discover ones spiritual, social, moral place.

The albums sweetest track, We Belong Together, borrows Kanye Wests nonchalance to make simple rhyming sentiment into political profundity (We go together like Keats and Yeats) then hikes up the significance: We stay united like these Ol States / Its how we go together. Koenig and Haim are reunited for our Republics most wised-up wishing: Baby, theres no use in being clever / It dont mean we stay together. While recalling a nursery-school chant, the song is also politically sobering. Hallelujah, youre still mine . . . / Howd this pair of stars align?

Theres lament inside Vampire Weekends wonderment, which gives substance to the albums first single, Harmony Hall. Summarizing 21st-century discontent, the song is lively while containing our conflicting instincts: Anger wants a voice / Voices want to sing / Singers harmonize / Till you cant hear anything. Political cacophony is not excused, but our recognition of what it is, is enriched, made sumptuous.

Koenig critiques our corrupted institutions: The stone walls of Harmony Hall bear witness / Anybody with a worried mind could never forgive the sight / Of wicked snakes inside a place / You thought was dignified / I dont want to live like this / But I dont want to die. This Millennial jeremiad supplies the righteousness thats been missing from much current deranged discourse. Like the Hallelujah! in We Belong Together, it is uniquely satisfying. No op-ed pundit has accomplished the emotionally generous detachment of Harmony Hall. (The songs title references a Columbia dormitory, evocative for alumni like me but an institutional metaphor for others.) Koenig continues the moral obligation that Morrissey revived in his cover of Phil Ochss Days of Decision on California Son. Every line is more poignant, and each measure more lovely, than the preceding. Beneath gentle pianissimo is the rhythmic rumbling of communion it is spiritually soaring and makes you want to dance-out everyday anxiety. How a song this extraordinary, this buoyant and rousing, failed to be the No. 1 record on everyones mind is the great artistic mystery of 2019.

Vampire Weekend states our political condition perfectly: Now we got that sympathy / What Im to you / You are to me / Lets go. We need a twelve-inch dance-club remix right now.

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Vampire Weekend Makes the Best Pop-Political Album of the Year - National Review

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero