Vampire Weekend - Father of the Bride

No tracklisting or official release date yet

Here are the first two songs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfGEq0JWxGM

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

Koenig revealed some other details about the record in a Beats 1 interview with Matt Wilkinson. Koenig said that ex-VW member Rostam Batmanglij contributed production to “Harmony Hall,” and that there’s another track that they “worked very closely on.” He also said that guitarist Greg Leisz plays the solo on “Harmony Hall” and is “all over the record,” while Dave Longstreth contributed another guitar part to “Harmony Hall.” Danielle Haim is also credited on the track. Jenny Lewis sings the “boy” motif in “2021,” Koenig revealed to NPR.

Speaking about “2021,” Koenig said that the track samples Japanese music icon Haruomi Hosono. “This is music that he composed in the ’80s to be played in Muji stores in Japan,” Koenig explained. “And when I first heard it, I was so struck by it and I immediately started looping it and I started writing this song on top of it. So anyway, shout out to Haruomi Hosono, who has graciously cleared the sample for us, and I guess shout out to Muji, too. They don’t own it anymore, he does, but, you know.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Koenig confirmed that the Internet’s Steve Lacy is on FOTB.

That piano in "Harmony Hall" has my name written on it. A minute too long, though.

'Harmony Hall' is a reference to Owenism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owenism

I'm beginning to really feel the lyrics:

Anger wants a voice / Voices wanna sing
Singers harmonize / Til they can’t hear anything
I thought that I was free / From all that questioning
But every time a problem ends / Another one begins

And the stone walls / of Harmony Hall / bear witness
Anybody with a worried mind could never forgive the sight
Of wicked snakes / Inside a place / You thought was dignified
I don’t wanna live like this / But I don’t wanna die

There's something really frightening about 'Singers Harmonize til they can't hear anything'. And of course the harmonizing on 'can't hear anything'.

'Harmony Hall' is a reference to Owenism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owenism

Or maybe just the name of a dorm at Columbia

there's a dorm named Owenize?

'Harmony Hall' is a reference to Owenism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owenism
Or maybe just the name of a dorm at Columbia

― jaymc, 24. januar 2019 15:21 (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lol, that makes it even better.

2021 samples that Hosono meme song.

This comment section is gold by yt standards

https://youtu.be/34UutDrXV2Q

HH sort of sounds like grateful dead no?

solo sounds so much like "Touch of Grey" yeah

"Finger Back" is one of my favorite VW songs but even I find the extensive quoting of the song - lyrically & musically - very strange. Don't know what to make of it.

Harmony hall kinda country

so far these sound like the parts of ‘modern’ that i wasn’t crazy about

I dig 2021 but it’s 99% because of the sample.

HH is too MOR music for my taste hope the whole album isn’t in this vein.

it's too dense with musical touches for MOR.

kinda deflated that this is where their production ended up after modern vampires tbh

That's what happens after six years. Imagine if they'd issued their Aerial.

i've seen a few folks around the internet suggesting that HH sounds too MOR or commercial

what specifically is it about the older records that kept them from feeling commercial/MOR? the highlife guitar? the synths on contra? the distortion on MVOTC?

i think the song rules personally but i'm also fascinated by the social baggage certain sounds accumulate in peoples' minds

kinda disappointed by both. HH leaning on recycling a previous song's refrain is just distracting.

Dig both of these songs. Can't wait to listen again when I'm not at my work computer with mediocre headphones.

I didn't hear "Finger Back" until someone pointed out, actually.

Aw... I was so excited to hear new stuff from them AT LAST !
But very disappointed... HH sounds like the opening song for a 90s romcom...

kinda disappointed by both. HH leaning on recycling a previous song's refrain is just distracting.

rappers do it all the time

the problem with it in this case is that now Fingerback is stuck in my head, not HH

xpost on Ottoman, Ezra recycled the "feels so unnatural, Peter Gabriel too" line from Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa

this is a much better pair of singles than the first two we got for MVOTC

uh neither of these touch “step”

otm

Who ever said HH sounded like Touch of Grey is way too otm

Seriously that solo tho

Like both these songs

xpost on Ottoman, Ezra recycled the "feels so unnatural, Peter Gabriel too" line from Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa

I’m not annoyed just perplexed, and as a meta touch within the context of the double LP might be cool

whether or not it works is up for debate but it seemed pretty obvious to me that that was done for artistic effect

i actually really liked "Harmony Hall" on first listen. not sure why it's so unlike around here.

i think everything everyone is picking out in harmony hall (the solo, the dead vibe, the piano, the meta chorus) has been done with extreme intent. it's an incredible song and i hope the rest of the album is this worked over because that's what vw does really well.

it's very pretty

yeah i'm liking it despite going in skeptical that they could make me care again

i don't hate it!

I expected to not care one bit about this, but HH is a very nice song that I might listen to a dozen times over the course of my life.

"harmony hall" is a little fractured structurally and some of the vocal parts are not his best, but i personally love the production

that said i like "2021" better

it all kinda reminds me of dirty projectors a bit, at least as far as the guitars go

& i guess longstreth played on hh

After a few more plays of HH, it's not as bad as I first thought.
I still don't find it great (nowhere near their previous singles) and am still disappointed after 6 years but the production/arrangements are more vivid than on MVOTC and it does sound good (especially the bass/drums with a kinda madchester groove !).

Loving 'Harmony Hall', like you know how when bands try and do a 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' thing and it's usually rubbish? This actually pulls it off.

I liked 'Modern Vampires' a lot as well but I feel like another indie pop record with multicoloured synths and huge clattery drums is the last thing the world needs right now.

re: madchester and "you can't always get what you want" i definitely thought of "movin' on up" on first listen

"harmony hall" feels exactly where they should be at this point in their career - a little more relaxed & not as frantic or with as much of the tightly wound baroque flourishes, a good way to mature

Yeah MVOTC lacked the baroque keyboards/strings as well as the afro guitar licks and a general lightness.
It's good if they go back to these key aspects of their sound.

MVOTC still had some of the baroque aspect ("step" and "don't lie" especially, which were some of the stronger tracks) but lacked that general lightness from the afro guitar etc. and i think that contrast was fairly key to the first two albums. "harmony hall" is a return to that lightness but not quite to the same degree which is what i like about it

yes, I totally agree.

All I can think about is how Brad Paisley married the actress from Father of the Bride and then wrote a song about how he married the actress from Father of the Bride and titled it Back to the Future.

she specifically says she was dating this guy at 18 which apparently lines up with when they were dating

https://www.thefocus.news/celebrity/tavi-gevinson-ezra-koenig/

is koenig a rich kid?

I didn't think he grew up particularly rich, his father was a set dresser for film/tv? Upper middle class Jews?

He would have been rich by the time they were dating, though. But he was also famous by then, so - ????

This is the bit I was looking at: When my abuser said he thought that it was I who “had all the power” while he was a hapless, insecure, wealthy, much-older-than-me man who didn’t know what he was doing, I at first believed him. I was in a splashy phase of my career. I did get us into parties.

That certainly doesn't rule out its being Koenig, and the dates line up. I just initially took it to mean the abuser wasn't a celebrity, but I really have no idea how many parties Ezra Koenig gets invited to; it could very well still be him.

His father is a psychotherapist. His mother was a set dresser: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0462850/

The allegations are sad, and Koenig should address them if they are indeed about him. I know it's tough for anyone to come forward about things like this, but at the same time, there must be a better way of doing it than vaguely identifying someone in a rambling feature about a Britney Spears documentary (where the author doesn't seem to have any direct connection to the film or Spears herself). Then again, I've never actually read her stuff before, so maybe this is how she is as a writer?

Not to quibble but that imdb link says he's Ezra's father.

Not to quibble but that imdb link says he's Ezra's father.

I've been COMPLETELY wrong and got them mixed up. His mother's the psychotherapist.

kind of a muted response

if more comes out will it be like [the other guys] all over again?

i mean in general not singling anyone out

I think it's just sort of hard to know how to respond to an allegation where the person hasn't been named yet, even if you have a pretty good idea of who it is.

idk is he litigious? he is surely aware of online speculation by now

i haven't followed this band so don't know why some people on twitter have made this connection so clearly but they seem to know what they're talking about

a lot of ppl on twitter seem to know what they're talking about

if i were a news organization there's nothing here i'd run with pending further disclosure

doesn't mean it wasn't gross at the time, and there are certainly portions of the text that are ezra-shaped

it's well established that tavi dated him when she was 18 so it seems possible or even likely he's at least one of the men referred to in her piece. not
definite but i very much get why people are connecting the dots

c.30 and 18 - this is common knowledge? that's fucked up

if media orgs that have supported this band are withholding judgment on this i hope they stop giving them coverage in the meantime

c.30 and 18 - this is common knowledge? that's fucked up

a succinct summary of the history of rock n' roll

yeah and it was repulsive when journos were enabling/covering for this stuff in the 60s/70s from artists who openly bragged about it (some still do)

this is supposed to be a more sensitive era with more sensitive bands and media but it often feels like the most radical change is in the marketing

at the time they were just seen together a lot and there were rumours, and then a few years later tavi implicitly confirmed they'd dated in her book i think it was

even if he hadn't done anything untoward, it showed extremely bad judgment on his part, and now it's possibly worse than that

there's other artists who've done similar stuff recently, matty healy dated an 18 year old when he was 27 which is again at the very least quite bad judgment, it's bleak

Men are generally not emotionally smart enough to understand that when you are 30 dating anyone under 23 is not a good look, I can't imagine how someone who has a #1 album at age 24 is supposed to live in something other than a total moral vacuum.

Yeah the "rich but not famous" part doesn't really sound square tbh. I don't know how rich he is, but I'd say he's at least as famous as he is rich. He definitely didn't need her to get into New York parties in 2015. He is most likely one of the other ones she talks about, though.

yeah that's my read of it too

I think it complicates things that she says in the piece that she doesn't want him named or canceled, so I don't know what kind of statement he could make at this point (although she must have known the speculation that would ensue).

i think it's weird that this person i've never heard of wrote a thing that names no one and the guy from VW is supposed to do something about it?

This all is gonna make the announcement that Woody Allen will be playing clarinet on the next VW album that much more awkward.

well if alpine static hasn't heard of you why bother

This all is gonna make the announcement that Woody Allen will be playing clarinet on the next VW album that much more awkward.

― "what are you DOING to fleetwood mac??" (C. Grisso/McCain), Monday, March 8, 2021 9:20 PM (fifty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Guilty lol

I’m still baffled that there’s been no press mention of the fact that the drummer and bassist of this band don’t appear to have played on the album at all.

Like, even if everyone in the bands is cool with that reality, it’s weird that it isn’t mentioned anywhere.

All that said - I have somewhat of an allergy to bands where it feels like the front person plus whoever, where the interviews come down to that person and that person doesn’t even mention band mates.

if you scroll up a bit, there's something a bit more urgent pertaining to this band that the music press should mention

(though I get why they haven't for legal/ethical/journalistic/etc. reasons)

Nbd but I don't think that's true, I think it's the band rhythm section of everything unless otherwise noted

Murgatriod, yes, I am quite aware of that and I agree. Hopefully it didn’t seem like I was trying to minimize that story. And, yes, I’m quite aware that my revive was pedantic and won’t matter to anyone else really

Jordan, it’s just really weird to look at album credits (online and on the physical CD) and encounter absolutely zero reference to the band members other than the leader.

Online it seems like they're primarily writing/production credits, not performance credits (except for the guests)? But yeah it's a weird omission.

It makes Rostam Batmanglij's departure more understandable, when he talked about having his work "stand on its own."

Like the implication it needs to be recognized outfront and on its own instead of potentially buried or uncredited altogether.

I thought Modern Vampires made clear that in the studio Koenig and (before he skedaddled) Batmanglij did most of the playing and programming.

Rostam’s solo stuff is great - on par with any of the VW stuff but a little more sonically adventurous. His new singles are getting me excited for the new LP.

No way -- the lyrics and singing aren't halfway as interesting.

Yeah from what I know his work has the former guitarist from a famous band gone solo syndrom : the music can be interesting but the vocal/lyrical side is weak...

I dig it.

This song I've never heard before came up on Spotify, and I assumed it was a song by Vampire Weekend, specifically, from this album, that I didn't know. But it's not, it's a song by the Jerry Garcia band from 1978!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YZEEQdpPzg

haha, nice

Yeah they were sort of open about the Jerry Garcia influence on this album and even played a lick from china cat sunflower on their cover of Post Malone’s sunflower - and they also played bits of their own song “sunflower” in it.

Iirc some Vampire Weekend members even played with The Grateful Dead in a concert tribute to Jerry Garcia.

Yeah, and I remember reading an interview with Ezra where he said this album was musically inspired specifically by the Jerry Garcia Band rather than the Grateful Dead. This makes total sense after hearing "Rubin and Cherise"

Whoa, so I was actually right! I thought maybe this was one of those things where it sounded identical to me but it was some idiosyncratic thing about my ear/brain.

Yep

“Father of the Bride” isn’t total dad-rock; it’s got weird beats and processed synth sounds and samples of tracks by Hans Zimmer and the Japanese electronic musician Haruomi Hosono — evidence of the “adaptability” that led promoter Craig Nyman to book Vampire Weekend as one of the few rock acts (alongside Post Malone and Billie Eilish) at September’s Life Is Beautiful festival in Las Vegas.

But pay close attention to “Stranger” — especially the little instrumental section after the second verse — and you’ll catch an undeniable whiff of the Jerry Garcia Band.

“And I’m talking JGB, not the Dead,” Koenig said. “That’s an important distinction.”

https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-ent-vampire-weekend-feature-0507-story.html

Gotta assume that's influence from his Time Crisis co-host (who has a Grateful Dead tribute band)

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/grateful-dead-phish-vampire-weekend-members-on-jerry-garcia-tribute-177078/

It was the drummer Chris Tomson in 2012.