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Only God Was Above Us COLUMBIA 9/10

Indie-rock over-achievers re-emerge with an anxiety-exorcising masterpiece. By Will Hermes

MICHAELSCHMELLING

CLEVERNESS gets you only so far in life, and its limits become clearer with age.

Vampire Weekend’s first album in roughly five years deals with that kind of reckoning. Its opening line:

“Fuck the world” –spoken in context of alovers’ sparring match, ageopolitical negotiation, maybe both. Ezra Koenig’s vocals are dirty with distortion, draped in coiled feedback, and they build to a panic attack of galloping drums, presto orchestral strings and guitar squeals amid talk of soldiers, police, war and weaponised language. The song, “Ice Cream Piano” (note the “I scream” homophone), is bunker-mentality neorealism, and quite away from the scenes of privileged youth “in the colours of Benetton” on the band’s 2008 debut, blithely spilling kefir on an accessorising keffiyeh and second-guessing last night’s hookup en route to class.

Fair enough: Vampire Weekend are nearly 20 years in, and these are dark times. Gone too is the wistfully upbeat jam-band vibe of 2019’s Father Of The Bride, an impressive pivot after the departure of co-founder Rostam Batmanglij, long on laidback guitar spirals, pedal steel sparkles, Danielle Haim vocals and their trademark boutique internationalism. By comparison, Only God Was Above Us is off its meds –grimier, sonically and spiritually; more compressed, more stressed. Lyrically, conflict is everywhere, and nothing is stable.