On April 28, 1988, while making a routine flight between the Hawaiian cities of Hilo and Honolulu, Aloha Airlines 243 lost a piece of fuselage cover at a height of thirteen thousand feet, causing a gash inside the airplane. Among the survivors interviewed following the emergency landing, one commented: “Only God was above us.” The phrase was featured on the front page of the New York Daily in its May 1st edition, as well as appearing on the cover of Vampire Weekend’s fifth album, a shot by photographer Steven Siegel (author of all the images ofartwork) set inside an old subway car in which another human figure, in the background, stands out in a position that has nothing to do with gravity.
If the plane crash is preparatory to turning the clock back a few decades and therefore the entire setting of the work, it is the intimacy of an everyday scene – the subway, its passengers – that immortalises the image of a New York of yesteryear which, despite the various cities in which the songs were written, refined, chiseled for almost five years, represents the unique scenario of this new repertoire. In the bittersweet lines that chase each other in “Only God Was Above Us”, between playful outposts and contemplations cloaked in a patina of melancholy, one has the sensation that Ezra Koenig and his companions have found the exact point of balance in the dual soul that passes through their music: the festive one, precisely, and the reflective one.
Between the two, here, the second undoubtedly wins. If “Father Of The Bride” was a bridge to California crossed by some of the clearest and “pop” melodies written by Vampire Weekend – think of “This Life” and “Harmony Hall”, the new album seems rather to look at the shadowy atmospheres of “Modern Vampires Of The City”. Back then, New York was observed from above, with the skyscrapers hidden by a blanket of haze or who knows, perhaps smog. Here, not surprisingly, the city returns but the perspective is reversed: we enter its bowels, its stories. Like that of “Mary Boone”, an art collector whose parable is symptomatic of the narratives chosen for this new work, which begins with a barely whispered “fuck the world” and ends on the redundant and hopeful notes of “Hope” (precisely).
In this bringing everything home – figuratively and literally – of Vampire Weekend, in this sort of self-catharsis, in this teamwork that lasted years in a ping-pong of tracks sent from one member to the other from one side to the opposite one of the continent or the world, it is clear that the main road taken by Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio and Chris Tomson (Rostam Batmanglij left the project) is the one that leads to essentiality. Which does not mean reducing elements and orchestrations – on the contrary – but finding a new (inner) peace, an intimacy that rarely in sound of the Americans we had encountered.
Of course, the most eventful moments and weekend vampires there is no shortage, as “Classical” makes clear almost immediately, with that refrain oblique which has been a registered trademark of New Yorkers for years now. Even the indie-rock of “Prep-School Gangsters” is there to remind us that, when our band decides to go all out with indie-pop, they have few rivals nowadays. A speech that is even more valid for the sonic/pocket assault of “Gen-X Cops”, a number that seems to slip from the hands of fellow MGMT citizens. The irresistible crescendo of “Ice Cream Piano”, all guitar and keys overwhelmed by the arrival of the snare drum and strings on the scene, is the best of intro possible.
In parallel, there is a whole repertoire of songs that travel in different directions compared to those most explored so far by Vampire Weekend. The ballad “Capricorn” shines in the piano chimes and its emerging orchestrations, while it offers lyrics of extraordinary beauty and melancholy on the theme of defeat (“Capricorn/ The year that you were born/ Finished fast/ And the next one wasn’t yours”). The “Connect” march flows from a cascade of notes on the piano, the main instrument of this work, and it is here that possible (and unlikely) parallels with the latest Arctic Monkeys come to mind, in a perhaps unconscious game of suggestions between the two shores of the Atlantic. The roundabouts of keys create another song of great impact in its apparent simplicity.
Less impressive but equally notable is the sly parable of “The Surfer”, an indolent pop-rock wrapped in a vaguely chill warmth that seems destined to inexorably accompany the sunsets of the next summer season. The heartfelt trip-hop edges of “Mary Boone” – which features a sample of Soul II Soul – are reflected in the vaguely Eastern European atmospheres of “Pravda”, where the climax never arrives but the matter dissolves into a refrain of rare beauty.
The last little-big wonder of this treasure chest closes the games, a “Hope” that you can imagine hearing sung by a street singer-songwriter as well as by a gospel choir, perhaps in Harlem, certainly somewhere in New York.
10/04/2024
