vampire weekend - only god was above us, out april 5, 2024

this one is pretty great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2FbpYs4t0

i also have come fully around on "capricorn," good song

Koenig looks like early '80s Lindsay Buckingham in those closeups.

Reminds me of Los Panchos rendition of El Negro Zumbon. Which could made a good VW sample tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTcoENyLpps

These new songs sound like Belle and Sebastian in a way that previous VW, to my ear, does not.

yeah i like this one more than the other two, songwriting feels like less of a re-tread and the arrangement is even better

It's painful to watch an upright bass being played like that

Super amped for this record. "Classical" is a total heater.

yeah i'm just bored by koenig as a songwriter now, album doesn't do much for me

Yeah 2 of the new songs are nice enough like ok besides. the other 2 I don’t care about. Out of 10 that doesn’t look good…

there's still some interesting production tricks across the whole album but eh

"mary boone" is cute and low stakes, like i imagine the rest of the album will be

I liked the grab-bag what-the-hell half-of-these-songs-are-outtakes vibe of the last one, this one is not suggesting anything similar

Does "Mary Boone" use the Soul II Soul shufflebeat?

fuck this ephebophile foprock

banger. no skips

band who time and time again delivers the most grower not shower albums and we got the gallery shitting on it after first skim. it's okay, we'll still be here when you come around.

did not anticipate The Surfer, which opens like some lost track off one of my 90s underground hip hop mixtapes before heading into All Things Must Pass territory.

this blends all the things i love from MVOTC and Contra.

Ever analytical, Koenig mused that Vampire Weekend’s albums each reflected patron saints. He named Paul Simon for the band’s self-titled 2007 debut, Joe Strummer and Sublime for “Contra” from 2010, Leonard Cohen for “Modern Vampires of the City,” and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, along with Phish, for “Father of the Bride.” The new album, he said, may reflect a short-lived tour he didn’t get to see: the 1997 pairing of Rage Against the Machine and Wu-Tang Clan, which reached the cover of Rolling Stone.

From New York Times article

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/arts/music/vampire-weekend-only-god-was-above-us.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

A Petrusich praises the new album in a lyrics focused review in the New Yorker

Yeah surprising that she considers it one of their best… maybe the 6 other tracks are all bangers ! We’ll see Friday

Looking forward to this, trying to keep my expectations measured. (I haven’t heard any of the singles/advance tracks yet, on purpose.)

MVOTC is my favorite record of theirs.

this is better than mvotc (their worst) at least i will give it that

there is a gigantic, very frustrating contrast between how clever some of the arrangements are and how bored i am by the songwriting though

Wait, has this album leaked? I'm not seeing in the usual places.

It depends where the others fall in line for you, but this has dethroned Contra as my personal favorite. I really believe it's their best work.

It sags slightly for me after the opener with Classical and Capricorn back to back, but really only because I overplayed those singles. The whole thing is rather psychedelic, especially Connect and Pravda. their acid album??

obviously Ezra is chief but this one does feel like a return to the core, whereas FOTB feels more and more like a solo sideshow

Xpost: it leaked yesterday

Huh. I'm not finding it.

it leaked a few days ago, it's on soulseek

"there is a gigantic, very frustrating contrast between how clever some of the arrangements are and how bored i am by the songwriting though"

this may be a very basic question - from a musician at that - but what's the difference between good arranging and good songwriting? isn't it...at some level...all the same craft?

Idk, I think you can work very hard to gussy up an ok song with ear candy at every moment. That feels like what's happening hear, although it would be interesting to hear more stripped down versions.

only been into these guys casually. remember liking modern vampires + really liking contra. haven't revisited in a while. will do that, but checking out the few new songs on the internet jukebox ahead of the proper release right now. they do seem to have gone fully technicolor sunshine pop revival (keep in mind, i skipped bride entirely). i like "classical" a lot. very bright music. the new material has me excited to see what else is in store.

^FotB was, to somewhat oversimplify things, their jam band influenced release with some country and baggy elements thrown in to ... divisive effect. i was a huge fan of the record at the time, but i don't know if it has aged super well over the past 5 years. i forget where i read this but somewhere someone wrote that it feels more like a Time Crisis LP more than a VW LP. Koenig has confirmed that Chris Tomson and Chris Baio had no involvement with it beyond touring it.

the new LP feels more like revisiting their past work (particularly MVotC) through a more wizened and melancholy perspective with deliberately harsher sonics. feels kinda fan servicey, but damn if it doesn't hit me right in the feels quite a bit lol

by songwriting i mean the core of the song - the melody/chords etc., with the arrangement being everything else around that. as anza says, "the surfer" transitions from a 90s hip hop beat to sounding like something from all things must pass and that's a pretty cool fusion and progression. the song itself though is just ok, i'm not really moved by it despite really liking what the arrangement is doing. the hooks aren't there!

fotb is a bit inconsistent but i like it more than this one.

I'm on record as saying FotB is the only VW album I like and have listened to more than once (particularly my playlist version). But listening to all the Time Crisis eps got me through the pandemic (even though I also hate the Dead and jam bands).

this is better than mvotc (their worst) at least i will give it that

― ufo, Tuesday, April 2, 2024 6:54 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

hoping that often-right poster ufo is wrong and the album is good. this is giving me hope (i love mvotc)

really have no idea what to say to the argument that MVOTC is their worst album

It took me a few listens to get beyond the feeling that it was a rehash, but now I like it a lot. The songs aren't as challenging or developed as Contra, and it doesn't feel as heavy as MVOTC, but I think the relative looseness of it is a nice through line and I find it frankly already a lot more listenable than FOTB, which five years later I still think is their worst. It's probably the most I've let an album of theirs wash over me, and the album of theirs I think most benefits from a soft listen, if that makes sense. I also find the thematic unity of it (let go the hatred in your heart o critical one) mollifying, or at least useful as a midlife/long-haul sentiment. I agree the arrangements and sonic juxtapositions are pulling a lot of weight, but I also don't really see the issue there from a critical vantage in part because I find the juxtapositions interesting.

mvotc is so clunky and plodding and the arrangements are really hollow and flimsy.

contra is their best and the debut is still very good too

Yeah but mvotc has "step".

i love how quiet the drums are in the mix of "classical." he's gone tin pan via dark star. overall, it kinda reminds me of how bill bruford described his time in yes: everything was an influence + it all had to get represented in their songs. similar vibe here, just without the intentional technical pyrotechnics.

he's asking a valid question in the chorus, too. other new songs are good. "classical" is promising a lot, though.

mvotc is so clunky and plodding and the arrangements are really hollow and flimsy.

i really disagree w/ this but i also think it's ezra's best songwriting across an album from a lyrical & melodic perspective. maybe the debut beats it & i do love the debut but that's a very "specific time in my life" album that i don't return to. if we're talking like objective VW album rankings i'd have to consider it more deeply but i haven't played it front to back in a really long time. i love contra, it has some of my fav songs by them, the homoeroticism of the back half of that record in particular still lingers, i just think as a front to back listen it sags in places where modern vampires does not

i honestly can't see an argument for any record aside from FOTB being their worst unless you're someone like jordan who doesn't like their other records and is coming at it from a totally different POV. i think conceptually it was an interesting direction and i liked a lot of the visual aesthetics and even some of the songs, "this life" is amazing, "big blue" etc but yeah the songs on that album just don't stand up to the rest of their discog imo

I'm on record as saying FotB is the only VW album I like

lol me too. I don't particularly care about the other guys' involvement or that it's mostly a Koenig-and-friends album, it has so many good tunes (and/or likable ones, not always the same thing). It could lose some, but I don't mind the meandering. Not very into the singles from this one, but I'll give it a listen. I think Koenig is talented, whatever else he may be.

Like, "Mary Boone" is OK, but it mostly makes me want to hear "Harmony Hall." (By far the VW song I encounter the most in the wild.)

Since Contra I've thought that Koenig's one of those white songwriters whose sensibilities most mesh with mine: inquisitive, well-schooled in rock/pop/rap history enough to know how much a light sheen of electronics plus forcebeat + dub rhythms will put over these songs about being privileged enough. For me they made no bad albums. "Giving Up the Gun" and "Diplomat's Son" are two of my favorite songs of the last two decades.

FOTB is their weakest, I guess, but as an experiment in opening up their sound after the departure of their most crucial member it committed venal sins. He never sounded warmer while at the same interrogating how warm he could go.

that's a very "specific time in my life" album that i don't return to.

how I feel about all Vampire Weekend albums

“Harmony Hall” was in my top ten songs of whatever year that was, but the parent record didn’t really hold my attention beyond maybe 4-5 songs. Save the duets and left turns for your solo record, Ezra!

Which in essence FOTB was.

he was outright calling it a solo album in a recent interview

I appreciate the acknowledgment of that in their recent press, as at the time it wasn’t really talked about by EK at all. (I know I was kind of a jerk about it back then, but it just felt really weird.)

"This Life" is an all-time jam and easily one of their top five best.

agree

16 years since their debut album. For the stones it was basically Tattoo you (64-81). Yeah maybe they are legacy act for aged fans now !

Good episode of NYT Popcast hosted by Jon Pareles feat. Amanda Petrusich and Matthew Strauss

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/arts/music/popcast-vampire-weekend.html

without any evidence or argument to back up my position: my feeling is this would have performed better if they hadn't gone major

They did that a long time ago; I reckon over 90% of Vampire Weekend songs are in a major key

Get your limited edition VW metrocard:

https://www.amny.com/transit/vampire-weekend-metrocards-available-manhattan/

You’d think they’d have one with the album cover.

Yeah, it does seem like Steven Siegel the cover photographer/artist might've denied them the rights for this purpose, since it would've worked perfectly.