Vampire Weekend - The modern vampires of indie-pop

Favorite sons of 2000s New York, raised in close contact and mutual exchange with Dirty Projectors — for whom frontman Ezra Koenig and multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij also briefly served as touring musicians — Vampire Weekend were the object of a cult following that grew by word of mouth online well before their debut album even came out. Even without the push of the internet, though, it's hard to imagine a different fate for the band that was, and still is, the foremost exponent of third-millennium indie-pop. Credit goes to a unique style capable of cross-pollinating American indie-rock with world sounds and artsy ambitions, as well as to that underlying freshness that runs through every song by the New Yorkers like a light breeze.

From word of mouth to a record deal

You don't need to rewind the tape very far to get back to the origins of Vampire Weekend. It's the mid-2000s when two college students with a passion for music team up to record a rap track. They call themselves Ezra Koenig and Chris Tomson, and as a stage name they choose L'Homme Run, in what already looks like an early attempt at mixing different languages and backgrounds. They themselves, in fact, boast far-flung origins: Koenig was born into a Jewish family of Romanian and Hungarian descent, while Tomson has practically half of Europe in his blood, with Irish, Ukrainian, English and German ancestry. A melting pot destined to grow wider with the arrival of the band's other two members, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, of Iranian descent, and guitarist Chris Baio, of Italian descent (he would later discover a distant kinship with Steve Buscemi). With the lineup settled, all that's left is to find a definitive name: Vampire Weekend, taken from the title of a short film Koenig planned to shoot, before eventually dropping the idea.

All the more so because, while Koenig and Batmanglij were trading ideas and visions with Dirty Projectors — perhaps the only project to which they can plausibly be compared — the group was starting to hit its first, but significant, milestones. A battle of the bands held in late 2006 at Lerner Hall, in the heart of Columbia University, which the four were about to graduate from, served as the testing ground for a handful of original songs. The plan was to spend the first money earned from day jobs to self-produce a full album the following year. Things, however, turned out differently. It only took one song, released well in advance to gauge the approval of bloggers and thus of the audience out there, to launch Vampire Weekend to a far higher level than they had ever planned.

Carried along by word of mouth, "Cape Kod Kwassa Kwassa" reached the ears of the Rolling Stone staff, who without missing a beat placed it at number 67 on their list of the "100 Best Songs of the Year". Not a bad start, considering the New York vampires hadn't even released their debut album yet. "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" is an irreverent parody of college life and a certain well-off social set that populates it (“As a young girl/ Louis Vuitton/ with you mother on a sandy lawn/ as a sophomore with reggaeton/ and the linens you’re sitting on” […] “is your bed made?/ is your sweater on?/ do you wanna fly?/ like you know I do, like you know I do”), and it already contains those world-music roots that the quartet grafts with remarkable consistency onto its soft melodies. Between guitar riffs and bongo beats, it feels like sitting around a bonfire on the beaches of Long Island.

Their UK tour opening for The Shins in the autumn of 2007 confirmed the mounting interest around Vampire Weekend. By now everyone had noticed Koenig and co. (Spin magazine voted them "The year's best new band"), including XL Recordings, which was the quickest to get them signed. Meanwhile, the shaping of a truly unique style was already well underway: the band's unofficial manifesto called for the exclusion of anything too "rock", banning distortion as well as trip-hop and post-punk influences. Their primary source of inspiration was instead modern African pop, an entirely new territory to conquer for Koenig and Batmanglij: "If you look beyond indie rock, there have always been Westerners interested in African music, but in a kind of new-age way, as if it conferred some higher spirituality. We're interested in the modernity of African music. They use electric guitars. It's not some mythical land outside of time," Koenig told The Guardian. Just add a touch of Feelies-style restlessness, some David Byrne class, and the melodic sense of Paul Simon, and the job's done.

Then there's the attitude, and the way they dressed: the look. That air of good boys, middle-class college kids just restless enough, as they liked to show in their videos, hair always neat, Ralph Lauren polo shirts and a flawless Ivy League style that wasn't merely a pose for the press, but a genuine way of being. Think of Wes Anderson's films: Vampire Weekend seem to embody their protagonists.

From "Vampire Weekend" to global success

On January 29, 2008, the debut Vampire Weekend came out, an album that has every right to be called "anticipated". A grand chandelier shot at an angle, almost unsettling as it looms over a crowded room tinted in sepia tones. This is where the party is, this is where the American indie-pop scene gains that touch of exoticism it was missing to become truly iconic. As Gabriele Benzing shrewdly noted in his review written "live" for Ondarock: "The secret lies in the fact that their blend of Afrobeat flavors, indie frenzy and catchy melodies has nothing to do with the classic third-worldist postcard that winks at world music: theirs isn't a real Africa, it's an Africa dreamed up within the walls of a college dorm room, and that's exactly what gives the thrill of being the first explorers of an imaginary continent. Vampire Weekend's exotic spices come from the corner store: if they pretended to be genuine, they'd be indistinguishable from any trendy ethnic menu; instead they make no secret of their brazen mixing of seemingly irreconcilable worlds. And so that mixed-breed crossover dreamed up after class on some campus becomes something new and unexpected, where Louis Vuitton rhymes with reggaeton and the sky is painted in Benetton colors."

Vampire Weekend's music is a kind of genteel bacchanal, torn between adopting a British composure (another declared influence) and the uncontrollable urge to simply raise a ruckus. Many songs swing between these two souls, starting with the pocket-big-band spirit of "Mansard Roof", through to the schizoid pop of "A-Punk", which has turned up in a countless number of film and video game soundtracks and remains to this day the New York vampires' best-known song by far. The project's more intellectual side flows through tracks like "Oxford Comma" or "I Stand Corrected", though they're still exercises for recent post-grads fresh out of the classroom – Koenig, in fact, had already gone back, this time as a middle-school language teacher. What else could a song called "Campus" possibly represent?

Also worth a mention are "M79", with its baroque apparatus propping it up, and "Walcott", if only because its title revives the protagonist Ezra Koenig had once imagined for a short film that was never made. Posthumous soundtracks for nonexistent movies.

Success came instantly, both in America and the UK, a country with which Vampire Weekend proved to share a great deal of affinity. Appearances on The Late Show With David Letterman and Saturday Night Live cemented the popularity of a band that broke into the Top 20 on both sides of the Atlantic. Barely two years later, again in January (2010), came their second album, titled Contra, accompanied by a long world tour that saw them play some of the planet's biggest stages, including Glastonbury. The record could be streamed in full on Vampire Weekend's official website, which didn't stop it from debuting at number 1 on the Billboard 200.

The sonic material hadn't shifted an inch, and the four of them now handled it with an enviable ease and care. Contra is thus the full realization of a genuinely unique style, an indie-pop tinged with world-music inflections, as on "Horchata", which soars on the wings of a blatantly holiday-like lightheartedness in "Holiday", and which by this point isn't even afraid to venture into fully rock territory, producing a couple of solid bombs like "Cousins" and "Giving Up The Gun", both released as singles.

There's no shortage of tracks in which Vampire Weekend look at themselves in the mirror, pleased with what they see. "White Sky" is a frivolous exercise in style and nothing more. "Run" is a successful jumble of electronic riffs, orchestral openings, rhythmic progressions that shift shape as the song unfolds. "Diplomat's Son" packs six minutes with Caribbean timbres and reggae rhythms numbed by New York's city traffic. The lukewarm waters of "I Think Ur A Contra" close the curtain on a minor note, as if rediscovering an intimate, human dimension after a long party.

Da “Modern Vampires Of The City” a “Father Of The Bride”

With Contra, nominated for a Grammy for "Best Alternative Music Album", and the tours that followed, Vampire Weekend seemed ready to ride the wave, but even though talk of a new record had already begun in late 2011, it wasn't until May 2013 that the quartet's third chapter saw the light, recorded between New York and Los Angeles: Modern Vampires of the City. In between, there was even an endorsement from Barack Obama, who in 2012, on the campaign trail, named the band among his favorites.

While sticking close to the style that defines the band, this third chapter brings a few new elements. First of all in mood, slightly less extroverted and at times more reflective, though without giving up their usual joyful explosions. Koenig described it as a record that's "darker and more organic" and "the last of a trilogy" that is, in practice, purely imaginary. Certainly, it would be hard to picture certain tracks on the tracklist of their earlier records: the bittersweet melancholy of harpsichord on "Step" and the one propelled by the Hammond organ on "Don't Lie" seem to materialize within the urban haze (fog or smog?) that fills the spaces between the skyscrapers on the cover. Another novelty is the presence of a producer, namely Ariel Rechtshaid, who had already worked with many major names on the international rock and pop scene, alongside Batmanglij, who until then had been the band's sole producer.

That Rechtshaid's hand is behind certain choices is more than just a suspicion. Koenig himself told the press that he enjoyed exploring ideas the band used to find boring, with piano, acoustic guitar and Hammond organ given more room. And so the brand-new, graceful lyricism of "Hannah Hunt" cradles itself in a muffled, crepuscular intimacy, standing out as one of the most intense songs ever to emerge from the New York outfit's workshop (“Our days were long/ our nights no longer/ though we live on the Us dollar/ you and me, we got our own sense of time”).

It's also true that there's no shortage of chapters in which Vampire Weekend play at being Vampire Weekend. "Finger Back" and "Ya Hey" are pure style exercises, one sonic and the other self-deprecating, while "Obvious Bicycle" only needs to adopt a slightly more serious expression to open up other, if not exactly new then at least adjacent, scenarios.

And then there's that little masterpiece "Unbelievers", with its bass drum inviting you to stomp your feet in time and the Hammond organ once again coloring a kind of intense little march, a wildly inspired merry-go-round that pairs with the even more extroverted "Diane Young", one of those explosive numbers the four of them manage to slip onto every album, in which they seem to lose their self-control for a few minutes to invite everyone to listen to the most riotous of bacchanals. Two wonderful songs, two manifestos of Vampire Weekend's musical art.

Of a very different tenor is the closing pair made up of "Hudson", the river that runs through New York portrayed in grey, almost solemn tones, and "Young Lion", with piano hinting at classical airs and vocals settling into West Coast timbres. An omen for the future?

In a way, yes, with hindsight. "Modern Vampires Of The City" returns to number 1 on the Billboard chart, and the "vampires" embark on another lengthy world tour that keeps them busy until September 2014. Meanwhile, Ezra Koenig marries actress Rashida Jones, to whom he'd been engaged for years (in 2018 they also have a son, Isaiah Jones Koenig), and moves to Los Angeles, where, between various projects (writing and producing animated series for Netflix), he also finds time to produce Beyoncé's "Lemonade". For a long time there's no trace of new records — quite the opposite: on 26 January 2016 it's announced that Rostam Batmanglij is no longer part of Vampire Weekend, though he'll continue to collaborate with the band. Only at the end of the year are fans reassured about the group's future, as they leave XL after a long tenure to sign with Columbia, part of the Sony universe. With their headlining appearance at the End of the Road Festival in Brighton in September 2018, the time is finally ripe for the release of the fourth album.

In early 2019 the first singles from the new album start coming out in pairs, with "Harmony Hall" and "2021" leading the way. Father Of The Bride is Vampire Weekend's first studio effort after six years of recording silence. The trio is joined by numerous producers and artists featured in various capacities. Ariel Rechtshaid is back at the helm, but departed member Rostam Batmanglij also plays an important role again, not least because part of the sprawling tracklist (18 songs) is salvaged from fairly old sessions. Koenig clearly takes on an even bigger role in the band's overall balance, including on the songwriting front, with several tracks that feel like unfinished sketches and generally sparer arrangements (though no less interesting for it), gradually filled out with instruments and fellow travelers, whether regular or occasional. That also explains the presence of so many guests: Danielle Haim on three tracks, Steve Lacy of The Internet on two, and rapper iLoveMakonnen on one of the lead singles, "This Life", co-written with Mark Ronson. Amid this parade of artists, voices stand out as the most "explored" and carefully studied instrument on the album, between choirs borrowed from film soundtracks ("Hold You Now"), bold vocal runs used for even bolder stylistic exercises ("Sunflower"), tightly knit duets ("Married In A Gold Rush", "Stranger") and off-the-cuff vocoder lines ("Flower Moon").

Koenig seems to allow himself even greater freedom than he had on the three previous records, which were certainly never guilty of monotony, let alone suspected of a lack of originality. "Hold You Now" and "Jerusalem, New York, Berlin", the songs that open and close the record, despite their featured guests, dive into a singer-songwriter dimension entirely new for Koenig — one that could open up new possibilities in some hypothetical future, even with just piano accompaniment, as on "My Mistake", or synthetic sounds, as on "2021". The introspection of "Big Blue" or the bittersweet flavor of "How Long?" and "Unbearably White" likewise have few real predecessors in the band's earlier work, but they highlight the reflective counterpoint of a songwriting approach that has, in any case, never produced dark corners.

More reassuring for longtime fans are the more playful moments on the record: the carefree spirit of "Harmony Hall" invites unlikely comparisons with Primal Scream, while the cheerful uptempo of "This Life" could pass for an outtake from the band's early work. That Koenig's pen is sharper than ever is also proven by a track like "Stranger", a pocket-sized indie/chamber-pop gem of a kind we hadn't heard in far too long. The inevitable exotic flair is guaranteed by the irresistible samba of "Sympathy", complete with handclapping underscoring its Latin roots, as well as by the graceful, exotic sway of "We Belong Together".

Deliberately disjointed, imperfect and at times out of focus, yet irresistible in places, substantial yet light in tone, Father Of The Bride shows the most spontaneous side of Ezra Koenig's band, which in its own way invites us to recover the carefree innocence we thought we'd lost.

Starting over as a trio: "Only God Was Above Us"

Five years on, Only God Was Above Us marks a new, significant chapter in Vampire Weekend's story. In the meantime, the band has shrunk to a trio following Rostam Batmanglij's departure, and over the past few years they've worked hard to refine and perfect the sound of their new songs.

On 28 April 1988, while flying a routine route between the Hawaiian cities of Hilo and Honolulu, Aloha Airlines Flight 243 lost a section of its fuselage skin at thirteen thousand feet, tearing open the cabin. Among the survivors interviewed after the emergency landing, one remarked: "Only God was above us". The phrase made the front page of the New York Daily News in its 1 May edition, just as it appears on the cover of Vampire Weekend's fifth album — a shot by photographer Steven Siegel (who took all the images used in the artwork) set inside an old subway car, in which another human figure, in the background, is caught in a pose that defies gravity.

If the plane crash serves to turn back the clock a few decades and thus sets the whole scene for the record, it's the intimacy of an everyday scene — the subway, its passengers — that captures the image of an old-time New York that, despite the many cities in which the songs were written, refined and polished over nearly five years, stands as the one true backdrop for this new body of work. In the bittersweet lines that chase each other through "Only God Was Above Us", between playful outposts and contemplations cloaked in a patina of melancholy, one gets the sense that Ezra Koenig and his bandmates have found the exact balance between the two souls running through their music: the festive one, as noted, and the reflective one.

Between the two, here, the second wins out without question. If "Father Of The Bride" was a bridge to California crossed by some of the clearest, most "pop" melodies Vampire Weekend ever wrote — think "This Life" and "Harmony Hall" — the new album seems instead to look back to the shadowy moods of "Modern Vampires Of The City". Back then, New York was viewed from above, its skyscrapers hidden beneath a blanket of haze, or perhaps smog. Here, tellingly, the city returns but the perspective is reversed: we go into its guts, into its stories. Like that of "Mary Boone", an art collector whose arc is symptomatic of the kind of narratives chosen for this new record, which opens with a barely whispered "fuck the world" and closes on the lush, hopeful notes of "Hope" (fittingly enough).

In this process of bringing everything home — figuratively and literally — for Vampire Weekend, in this sort of self-catharsis, in this years-long teamwork made of tracks volleyed back and forth from one member to another, from one side of the continent or the world to the other, it becomes clear that the main road taken by Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio and Chris Tomson (Rostam Batmanglij having left the project) is the one leading toward essentiality. That doesn't mean stripping away elements and orchestration — quite the opposite — but finding a new (inner) peace, an intimacy rarely found before in the Americans' sound.

Of course, the more boisterous, quintessentially-Vampire-Weekend moments aren't missing, as "Classical" makes clear almost right away, with that oblique refrain that has by now been a trademark of the New Yorkers for years. The indie-rock of "Prep-School Gangsters" is also there to remind us that, when these guys decide to go all in on indie-pop, they have few rivals these days. The same goes, even more so, for the pocket-sized sonic assault of "Gen-X Cops", a track that seems to have slipped straight out of the hands of fellow New Yorkers MGMT. The irresistible crescendo of "Ice Cream Piano", all guitar and keys swept up by the arrival of snare drum and strings, makes for the best possible intro.

Alongside these, there's a whole set of tracks heading in directions different from those Vampire Weekend have more often traveled so far. The ballad "Capricorn" shines through piano chimes and its emerging orchestration, unfolding 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 little march "Connect" flows out of a cascade of piano notes, the defining instrument of this record, and it's here that possible (and improbable) parallels with the latest Arctic Monkeys come to mind, in what might be an unwitting cross-Atlantic exchange of influences. The circling keys build another track of great impact in its apparent simplicity.

Less immediately striking but equally remarkable is the laid-back arc of "The Surfer", a languid pop-rock track wrapped in a vaguely chill warmth that seems destined to inevitably accompany next summer's sunsets. The heartfelt trip-hop leanings of "Mary Boone" — which features a Soul II Soul sample — are mirrored in the vaguely Eastern European moods of "Pravda", where the climax never quite arrives, but the material dissolves into a chorus of rare beauty.

Closing out the record is one last small-yet-great marvel in this treasure chest, a "Hope" that you could just as easily picture being sung by a street busker as by a gospel choir, maybe in Harlem, certainly somewhere in New York.

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