Vampire Weekends & # 39; Father of the Bride & # 39; is an important pop for adults – Mash Viral

This article will be published as part of the Uproxx Music Critics Survey 2019. Discover the results here.

Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig often seems like a man who has never had an unreasonable thought or feeling in his life and always thinks of everything from as many angles as possible to be fair. This mixture of generosity and intellectual flexibility makes him a fascinating character, both as a songwriter and as a moderator of his Beats1 internet radio show Time Crisis. But it is also something that limits the emotional range of his work somewhat, since all emotional extremes are kept in check by his cerebral tendencies and the overconsciousness of how something he could say could be interpreted.

This could be a danger in some cases, but with this year's Father Of The Bride (ranked 4th in the Uproxx Music Critics poll), his unapologetically mature and unshakably sensible approach to singing about the nuances of relationships and complications Life in a deeply unreasonable world, it felt like a much-needed respite after an apparently endless rush of fearful, nihilistic music in virtually every genre. He's not an opponent, but he's the guy who's here to try to put all of these fears in perspective.

Father Of The Bride is not a particularly happy or optimistic album. There is joy and hope in his songs, but all of this is related to larger things capitalism, privileges, politics, history that give a star to every pleasure. "Harmony Hall", the album's first single, is about the frustration of living in an institution that you know is corrupt and finding out how complicated you are when you exist in a society where these institutions are the only game in town.

Despite this topic, "Harmony Hall" is not just nervous. The music is mainly based on relaxed country and soul vibes from the 70s, and the tone is more philosophical than angry or fearful. The conclusions are bleak "each time a problem ends, another begins" and Koenig falls back to re-contextualize a lyric from the previous album, "Vampire Weekend," to express the song's dilemma: "I don't want to live like this but I don't want to die. "

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The rest of the songs on Father Of The Bride can be broken down like a pro / contra list of reasons why you don't want to live like this and why you don't want to die. Most of the reasons in the last column are related to romance and relationships, but his love songs focus on the work and compromises involved in maintaining these things. These songs have a certain warmth, but also the feeling that Koenig does a cost-benefit analysis of his emotional life. Can he beat his ego in "How long?" Endured enough not to spoil his affection for someone he loves? Can he be patient in "2021" or forgive in "Unbearable White"? Will the idea that he and his partner "belong together" actually be undermined by the understanding that "baby, that doesn't mean we stay together"?

"Stranger", by far the happiest love song on the record, is the one that is grounded by Koenig in a little moment in which he allows himself to be on a pleasant evening in the presence of his partner Rashida Jones and her sister Kidada. It's about recognizing what you want and need when you finally find it. In this case it's about friendliness, family and shaking off neuroses. It is track 16 on an album with 18 songs and the emotional climax of everything. He wants to live like this. But the song about coming out of the head is getting bigger too, as Koenig easily rewrites the chorus of New Order & # 39; s hit "Regret" and thinks about how someone who was so close to him was once a stranger to him ,

The father of the bride is just as much a musical runaway as a thematic one in 2019. Koenig has always specialized in a robust melodicism that has nothing to do with the rhythmically stricter and more harmoniously minimalist music of the past decade, but this record drives his music beyond and beyond the original formalism of his first three albums in collaboration with Rostam Batmanglij more expansive A palette based on the long cool aesthetics of jam bands and fusion.

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The allusions to Grateful Dead and Phish have been noted by critics and fans, but the composition and production owe more to the dry, immaculate sound and abundance of seasoned session players that were the hallmark of 70s pop. The current version of Vampire Weekend as a live band includes the original drummer Chris Tomson and bassist Chris Baio along with several other rented guns, but on this record Koenig is no different than Steely Dan in the late 70s, with each song from Session Food is played with Danielle Haim as a rough match of Michael McDonald and Steve Lacy as Jeff "Skunk" Baxter. Koenig's sincere fascination with the dead is well documented in Time Crisis, but ultimately he has a lot more in common with Steely Dan he's a similar kind of crooked intellectual and his songwriting only gets more compact, even though he emulates bands for which he is known for theirs exploratory looseness.

There is an interesting tension between Koenig's runaway status and his desire to belong to a larger music and cultural community, both in Father Of The Bride and in Time Crisis. Koenig's staff includes Haim and Lacy Ariel Rechtshaid, Dave 1 from Chromeo, Mark Ronson, BloodPop, DJ Dahi and Jenny Lewis, as well as songs that quote or interpolate music by iLoveMakonnen, Hans Zimmer and Japanese composer Haruomi Hosono. Koenig's curiosity and interest in culture determine a lot about who he is, and it is a crucial difference from Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who always viewed their contemporaries' music with a certain degree of contempt. The musical and lyrical ideas for Father Of The Bride should not run counter to the mainstream of music in the late 2010s or condescend, but rather complement the discourse. It all comes from a personal place, but there is hope to push things forward and bring new things into the conversation.

It is difficult to say what impact this music will have on other artists. It could be that Koenig is traveling on his own journey and that he only deals with dedicated, self-selecting vampire weekend and time crisis heads. There are certainly worse fates, and it seems as if at least part of Koenig's fixation on the Grateful Dead and Phish is to admire their great fandoms that exist outside of the whims of pop culture. But it would be nice if more people saw this work as a way away from the exaggerated hopelessness and growing youth at the center of music culture and towards a more mature version of pop that aims to relieve anxiety rather than wallowing in it.

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Vampire Weekends & # 39; Father of the Bride & # 39; is an important pop for adults - Mash Viral

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero