VAMPIRE WEEKEND - Only God Was Above Us

Il 28 aprile del 1988, mentre effettuava un volo di routine tra le città hawaiane di Hilo e Honolulu, il velivolo Aloha Airlines 243 perdeva un pezzo di copertura della fusoliera all’altezza di tredicimila piedi, provocando uno squarcio all’interno dell’aeroplano. Tra i superstiti intervistati in seguito all’atterraggio di emergenza, uno commentò: “Only God was above us”. La frase fu ripresa in prima pagina dal New York Daily nell’edizione del 1° maggio, così come appare nella copertina del quinto album dei Vampire Weekend, uno scatto del fotografo Steven Siegel (autore di tutte le immagini dell’artwork) ambientato all’interno di un vecchio vagone della metropolitana nel quale un’altra figura umana, sullo sfondo, si staglia in una posizione che nulla ha a che fare con la gravità.

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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10/04/2024