Only God Was Above Us: Vampire Weekend at Full Power

I have been trying, for a year, to work out what kind of Vampire Weekend record Only God Was Above Us is. The band has now made five albums across sixteen years. The first two (Vampire Weekend, Contra) were the preppy Ivy League records. Modern Vampires of the City was the New York adulthood record. Father of the Bride was the California-relocation record. Only God Was Above Us is, I think, the record where Ezra Koenig finally admits that the band has been, all along, something other than the band most of its listeners thought it was.

What the album is

Ten tracks, forty-seven minutes, co-produced by Koenig and Ariel Rechtshaid. The sonic palette is more cluttered than Vampire Weekend records have historically been: layered string arrangements, specific dissonant jazz-piano interjections, densely-mixed percussion. The reference points the band is working with include, in different places, Burt Bacharach, the Carpenters, late-period Steely Dan, and specific Soviet classical music.

The album is, structurally, a New York record. Specifically, a New York adulthood-after-fifty record, even though Koenig himself is only in his early forties. The songs are about inheritance, about generational repetition, about what it means to still care about the argumentative intellectual traditions of the late twentieth century at a moment when those traditions are being actively dismantled.

This is unfashionable territory. The album commits to it anyway.

The opening track

“Ice Cream Piano,” the album’s opening song, is the statement of intent. It is a nearly-six-minute multi-part suite that shifts registers three times across its running time. The opening is acoustic guitar and vocal, almost folk-registered. The middle section adds strings, shifting to a kind of late-60s baroque pop. The final section introduces a dissonant classical-piano motif that returns across the rest of the album.

This is a specific and deliberate move. The band is announcing that the short-and-clever indie-pop mode of the first two records is no longer the primary mode. This is a longer-form record that demands the listener’s sustained attention across extended structures.

What Koenig is writing about

Across the album’s ten tracks, Koenig’s lyrics circle a specific set of concerns that are worth naming:

1. Generational exhaustion. Several songs (“Classical,” “Gen-X Cops,” “Mary Boone”) deal explicitly with the experience of being a member of the specific American generation (roughly, people born between 1975 and 1985) who came of age believing in specific liberal-democratic institutions whose credibility has, across the 2010s and 2020s, substantially collapsed.

2. New York as memory. The album is explicitly set in New York, with specific geographic references (the Upper West Side, the A train, specific art-world figures from the 1980s). The city is not backdrop. The city is a specific historical archive Koenig is sifting.

3. Parental inheritance. Several songs deal with what Koenig has inherited, in specific cultural terms, from his parents’ generation, the boomers, and what that inheritance now requires him to do.

These are, in aggregate, the concerns of a middle-aged songwriter. Vampire Weekend has, at some point while we were not looking, become a middle-aged band.

The Steve Lacy intervention

“Connect,” the album’s longest track at eight minutes, features a guitar solo from Steve Lacy that is, on its own terms, one of the most remarkable pieces of instrumental music on a major-label pop album in years. The solo runs roughly three minutes. It is not melodic in any conventional sense. It is, specifically, Koenig asking Lacy to do what Lacy does, and Lacy delivering without restraint.

The presence of the solo on the track is a specific signal about where Vampire Weekend now sits in the music ecosystem. This is no longer a band that cares about pop-song discipline for its own sake. This is a band that will allocate three minutes of a pop song to a young collaborator’s distinct instrumental voice, because the band values the voice more than the discipline.

Where the album wobbles

One complaint. Only God Was Above Us is slightly over-produced in its middle stretch (tracks four through six). The density of the arrangements, which serves the album’s ambitions at the opening and closing, starts to feel, in the middle, like a way of papering over the songs’ specific thinness. Two of these middle tracks would, I think, have worked better as spare arrangements than as full-band productions.

This is, again, a first-decade complaint about a fifth-album record. Vampire Weekend have earned the right to over-produce. The over-production is consistent with the album’s ambition.

Where it sits

A year on, Only God Was Above Us has ended up receiving roughly the critical reception it deserved: respectful, admiring, slightly puzzled. The album was nominated for several Grammys but did not win any of the major categories. It has sold moderately well. It has not become the cultural event the band’s earlier records were.

This is fine. This is appropriate. Vampire Weekend is no longer the cultural event kind of band. They are the career kind of band. They have, across five albums, built one of the most distinctive American indie-rock catalogues of the twenty-first century.

Put the album on in one sitting. Pay attention to the piano motif that recurs across the record. Let Ezra Koenig be a middle-aged songwriter. He has earned it.