Vampire Weekend may be the last band in the mid-2000s indie boom to expect to open an album with the phrase “Fuck the World.” First song on God alone was above us, “Ice Cream Piano” — “In dreams, I scream at the piano,” the chorus says — is in no way an attempt to sound youthful or hardcore, despite the Minutemen's alleged influence on a new offshoot of Koenig and his bandmates. Chris Baio and Chris Thompson were teasing. Koenig sings the line softly, from the point of view of a careful observer – “You said it softly / No one could hear you / No one but me.” However, there is no doubt that, like most of us, you have at some point related to these feelings, even if you are more likely to curse loudly than scream at the top of your lungs. Koenig, who turns 40 this month, doesn't embrace maturity by distancing himself from the characters he embodies — he does so by leaning in and taking sides at the same time, neither vengeful nor defensive, not entirely impersonal but never acknowledging. He was the “Angry Kid,” of course, but that was just the beginning of the journey, and he had a limited time frame to move it along.
However, he waited for good reason: “If all you do is make music, what is the music about?” said Koenig, explaining why, aside from obvious fatigue, he no longer intended to release albums back-to-back. Since Vampire Weekend's last album in 2019 Father of the brideKoenig has lived in New York City, Tokyo, London, and Los Angeles, and wrote and recorded parts of the new album in all of those cities. Only New York creeps into her lyricism in any tangible way, but as a point of reference, a temporary home base, its specter is more formidable than the reality Koenig currently faces or even grew up in. , for example, points to Water Tunnel No. 3, a water supply tunnel that has been under construction since 1970 and is expected to be completed in 2032; The film “Prep School Gangs” takes its title from the year 1966 New York The magazine's cover story, according to its subtitle, “Some of New York's Richest Kids Have Joined[ing] The forces are with some of the poorest. Koenig seeks these stories not so much for objective commentary as their cross-generational appeal: “Somewhere in your family tree / There was someone just like me,” he sings on the latter.
If Koenig's lifestyle tells us what the album is about, it's in the emotions it conveys. The songs oscillate between anxiety and a kind of foggy isolation, both states that either distract us or force us to ascribe meaning to our lives. At first glance, the lead singles “Capricorn” and “Gen-X Cops” are at opposite ends of the spectrum. The first is contemplative and expansive, capturing the special, whimsical tone of a line like, “Sifting through the centuries / For moments of your own.” Although it arrives early in the album, the feeling of exhaustion has already set in, steering the protagonist away from anger and toward an alternative path: kinder, more honest, and above all effortless. Even on “Gen-X Cops,” the loudest and most stimulating song on the album, Koenig sounds doomed, rather than energized, by the pace at which everything moves: “Forever damned to live uncomfortable” is definitely a man’s statement. “His passion” “in life is chilling” you will sing. (Rock stars: They're just like us.) But the song most direct and earnest in its vulnerability is “Connect,” which sees Koenig thinking, “Is it weird that I can't connect? / It's not weird but 'I can check,'” as if simply He is We talk about technical communication. “I need it now,” he sings, accompanying himself with a high-pitched voice that could be misheard, with equal effect, as “I need Known“.
An older Vampire Weekend song might have dropped the song after three minutes, but as soon as the song ends, the band picks it up again, as if rearranging it from broken pieces and repressed memories. Making Up the Gap Between Albums, 2013 Modern city vampires And Father of the bride Both were stylistically skewed: one darker and strangely haunted, the other sprawling and casually lively. but God alone was above us It is the band's first album since then Contra who is more concerned with incorporating and retaining qualities from different eras; Although lyrical and thematic, it has its strongest resonances Modern vampires, and there's also a beautiful song called “Mary Boone,” which sounds like a descendant of “Hannah Hunt.” The record is focused yet loose, exhilarating, noisy and anxious yet strangely unbothered. I've found a definition of “alternative” that is entirely dependent on the band's path and musical language, and which disturbs it fundamentally by playing with two elements: distortion – be it through “Ice Cream Piano” or the scraping of the bright touch of “classical” – and space.
The album ends with Vampire Weekend's longest song to date, the eight-minute “Hope,” which might seem like an obvious conclusion to a record that begins with “Fuck the World.” But what's even bolder is the expansion of this sentiment, as the phrase “I hope you let go” simply ties each verse together rather than necessarily growing in conviction. In an interview, Koenig described optimism as fatalism taken to an extreme, rather than its opposite: “There's fatalism—the world is a messy place, isn't that terrible? And then there's optimism—the world is a messy place, and you've got to ride that wave. God alone was above us Not only does he make the point, he makes it easy to give in to that hopeful resolve, even if you have to give it up, too.
