Vampire Weekend’s Only God Was Above Us Doesn’t Quite Give Up the Gun

Heartbreaking: A band you love just released their best-titled album (with their best cover art!) and their weakest music.

Let’s not mince words; Vampire Weekend, even more than the self-important U2 and the oblique R.E.M., have done more to center history in their music than any other rock band of their stature, except for maybe The Clash — who never made a number-one album. But digging deep doesn’t make one deep, as their onetime year-end rival Kanye West has proven. And Vampire Weekend, who’ve just been awarded their first Best New Music designation since 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City was the best rock album of its decade, are more oblique than ever on their fifth album and first of the 2020s.

Only God Was Above Us, the title, is an astonishing quote from an astonishing rescue, when only one passenger of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 didn’t survive the aircraft’s roof being torn off mid-flight in 1988. This hyper-referential group grapples with historical weight like no other, to degrees more in line with cinema and literature — I can’t think of another band who makes people bring up footnotes so much. And this title, redolent of fatalism and desperation in a moment where people faced down death, boldly attempts to connect mortality to their own sins as major artists of privilege shrinking in the zeitgeist’s rearview mirror, one of the things Ezra Koenig has in common with Jonah Hill and Jerry Seinfeld, who both helped make 2019’s “Sunflower” video.

From “how the cruel, with time, becomes classical” to “the sentencing was overturned / the killer freed, the court adjourned / A hope betrayed, a lesson learned / I hope you let it go,” this album’s framework is that of some of pop’s brightest students (or “Prep-School Gangsters” as they bait us here) acknowledging history’s whitewashing and flattening of otherworldly horrors; that the Facebook feed we doomscroll simply mirrors the march of history itself. Maybe the eight-minute closer “Hope” is about how to put aside the atrocities of the world enough to live and breathe while still giving them the terrible recognition they require, in order to understand the depth of our collective shame and trudge forward without repeating. At the same time, this is the band’s most political album by simply remembering. “Mary Boone” is an art dealer and white-collar criminal. Pondering these conundrums from an album alone, as usual with this band, is lighting me up, I admit, in way that the music initially was not, though it’s already getting better and it never sounds less than their own.

What it doesn’t sound like is new. The surface, starting with the Yo La Tengo-esque feedback that announces “Ice Cream Piano,” is a typically unusual one: how many artists make their noisiest and subtlest album at the same time? So if the careening fuzz of “Gen-X Cops” is their latest conquest of uncharted territory and the baroque, harpsichord-worthy riff of “Classical” sounds like instantly familiar old times, are they doubling back on themselves or is 2024 rock running out of taboos? Quoting Lil Jon or ska or Afropop or splicing country with Jersey Club all remain worthwhile pursuits but no longer shatter any kind of ceiling for a music that’s no longer at the forefront of pop culture even when it’s popular like emo. So they don’t do anything of the sort.

Per usual, they find peace within the extraordinary breadth of their aural and lyrical vocabularies, but unless “elegantly wasted” in “Connect” is an INXS nod, they mostly only refer back to themselves, like the same song’s reggaeton beat hyperlinked from their own “Mansard Roof.” The homemade filtered breakbeats of “Capricorn” and “Classical” recall those of “Harmony Hall,” their previous Father of the Bride’s dip into Madchester, with which “Gen-X Cops” also shares an overt callback to Modern Vampires of the City. Just substitute the shared “Finger Back” chorus for a shared “Hudson” chorus. Weird pattern for first singles, but it cements the importance of that album not only to everyone else but also the band, and the mood returns to that predecessor’s darkness, if not its eloquence — first line of Only God Was Above Us is “fuck the world.” The same world depicted as a colorful, early ‘90s-style drawing on the cover of Father of the Bride?

So God returns to the misty grays of their last LP inspired by “20th-century New York,” which had a bit more god above it, while Koenig continues to chip away at his own contrition for generational curses. Literally: the album’s most quoted lyric is “each generation makes its own apology.”

 

VIDEO: Vampire Weekend “Mary Boone”

Where I’m standing, the staccato gospel samples of “Mary Boone” don’t make it “Ya Hey” and the manic zip of “Gen-X Cops” ain’t the fuckabilly “Diane Young.” But “Pravda,” a welcome return to liquid East African fretwork, is a reminder that Koenig is one of the most gifted guitarists of his class. And the devastating slow burn of “Hope” itself comprise a closing sequence as powerful as any they’ve put on record.

My own hope is that eventually the 15-minute stretch from “Connect” to “The Surfer” unlocks as music worthy of their brainwidths. Father of the Bride’s meanings may have been extra-scattered among its 18 vignettes, but the sun-bright sonics put every one across, from simulated “Brown Eyed Girl” to hard-strumming flamenco New Order.

For the first time, with loads of artificially dusty piano solos and too little Rostam Batmanglij, Vampire Weekend feel a little boxed in, and not just by history.

 

VIDEO: Vampire Weekend “Capricorn”