Ezra Koenig starts Most effective God Was once Above Us talking, it sort of feels, to only one individual. Towards a blur of amplifier hum and a tentative guitar strum, he sounds skinny and reedy, virtually petulant, a bit bit doomy. “‘Fuck the arena,’” Koenig sings softly, “You mentioned it quiet/Nobody may listen you/Nobody however me.”
This hushed distortion opens Vampire Weekend’s 5th album, the place Koenig and his bandmates, Chrises Baio and Tomson, gaze longingly on the previous to seek out extra questions than solutions. A major fear is historical past, and the place to suit inside it, however, in the end, Vampire Weekend itself is the focal point of Most effective God Was once Above Us. It’s the band’s maximum brazenly self-referential unlock, a collage of signature sounds and motifs dotted with allusions. It feels new and at ease, frequently sublime and fascinating, calm and comforting, and, now and then, foreboding. And just a little fearful.
That is to mention that Most effective God Was once Above Us could also be essentially the most truthful album Vampire Weekend have made, an encapsulation of what the band does easiest, melodic and abstruse in Koenig’s personal masterful method. Take the 2 glaring callbacks on “Attach,” which recreates Tomson’s “Mansard Roof” drum fill and suits in keyboards that bring to mind Contra’s runaway hit “Vacation.” The track is a full of life reverie about misplaced days in New York, however rather askew in its recollections and temper. Koenig and co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid seize the strangeness with a monitor that takes the signature Vampire Weekend sounds and twists them to be a bit jazzy, occasionally a bit digital, a beat clear of melting down totally. The result’s one thing like indie deja vu, the sense that we’ve heard this sooner than however can’t in any respect position it.
Although the band individuals themselves have lengthy lived in Los Angeles, New York nonetheless looms massive for Vampire Weekend. Koenig, Baio, and Tomson all grew up in or across the town and, with ex-bandmate however present contributor Rostam Batmanglij, famously coalesced at Columbia College. Being clear of New York, alternatively, provides a brand new standpoint: From a distance, the town seems as a decaying large, inescapably beholden to its previous and all of the ghosts who’ve handed thru. Just by naming New Yorkers of previous—the past due Russian-born newshounds Henry and Ludmilla Nikitina Shapiro, their daughter, Irina Shapiro Corten, the famed gallery proprietor Mary Boone, even a defunct tie store—Koenig’s always-vibrant international of name-drops observes the strangeness of dwelling in huge shadows.
