Father of the Bride

Father Of The Bride isn’t the shocking rebirth that might have been expected, given all of the information that trickled out about it over the past six years. Instead, it’s just far enough from expectations to surprise, but close enough to remain true. It’s a little messy and a little weird (and, again, a little long), but exactly the right record for Vampire Weekend right now.

Father of the Bride finds Vampire Weekend embracing change and delivering some of their most mature and satisfying music in the process.

Vampire Weekend were late arrivals, lacking the Strokes’ switch-blade attitude and the art-punk edge of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s. But Vampire Weekend now look like the smartest guys in the room, marshalling a sumptuous, emotionally complex music perfect in this pop moment.

An album that could soundtrack an afternoon picnic or be used as fodder for a doctorate thesis on songwriting. It’s a beautifully realized cipher in an age of unsatisfying answers.

Father of the Bride may not have the initial excitement and glistening energy of the band’s now-classic first three albums, but it offers a rewarding and audacious achievement of its own.

This album has a more mature twang to it, musically and lyrically. And interestingly enough, it's pretty minimalist and their simplest-sounding stuff to date.

While this isn’t an album of chart hits, a pop sensibility is evident in the way that they treat music-making as primarily a challenge of curation. So, myriad high-pedigree producers and instrumentalists abound, and yet somehow, a cohesive aesthetic emerges.

Sure, Father of the Bride is messy and overlong—it lacks the sharp brevity of Vampire Weekend's first trilogy of albums. But it is also a smart, witty, comforting listen.

It’s an album that exudes warmth and no little sonic familiarity, while reflecting what is a radically altered set-up.

Now we have Father of the Bride—a looser, broader album than Modern Vampires, the great sigh after a long holding of breath. There are still moments of conflict, but in general, you get the sense the band is just relieved to have run the gauntlet of their existential doubts and come out relatively unscathed, grateful to be here.

An unfashionable record, then, and that may be its best asset. With such low stakes and barely any emotional intensity, Father of the Bride won’t cement Vampire Weekend’s legacy. But after a highly strung decade on the indie-rock A-list, it gives them room to breathe.

Father Of The Bride is a joyous, fearless listen that builds on Vampire Weekend’s steeped history while simultaneously paying less attention to it than ever.

The bad ideas are vastly outweighed by moments where you can hear a band pushing past their boundaries with striking results.

At times, Koenig is reminiscent of Paul McCartney in nursery rhyme mode--tunefully sweet and silly. Yet Koenig’s pithily epigrammatic lyrics throw a bit of intellectual grit in the mix, even if they possess all the clarity of a cryptic crossword.

Koenig is a formidable lyricist, and behind the music's occasional larkiness lies a record of high seriousness. [Jun 2019, p.88]

The tracks are playfully, restlessly inventive.

As a collection, Father of the Bride holds together remarkably well. This is not some grand tome where these indie vets try and break new sonic territory every track for better or worse. Here we see a bunch of thirty-somethings letting go of some past anxieties and leaning into newfound securities. It's a relaxed record happily borrowing from the modern American songbook, a little Fleetwood Mac here, a little Paul Simon there.

Tying everything together is the mood of the whole piece--it’s a pastel kaleidoscope, summery and light on its feet throughout. But broadly, you can hive off Koenig’s songwriting predispositions into one of two categories--60s-indebted pop, and R'n'B-inflected experimentalism.

Vampire Weekend have never taken themselves too seriously (they've had plenty of critics to do so instead), and now that they're mostly unburdened from the narratives of their past, Father of the Bride finds them at their most relaxed, jovial and inviting.

Depending on your mood, there’ll be songs you’d happily lop off for a more streamlined listen, but by and large, all of these songs make the patchwork much more vibrant.

Longer, looser, less eager to impress, and more American than its predecessors ... Vampire Weekend's prettiest album is also their weightiest. [June 2019, p.106]

With Father of the Bride, Vampire Weekend expand and re-contextualise their own creative universe, offer more questions than answers, take new risks, and open up new possibilities for their artistic future. In the process of doing so, they add at least a handful of brilliant tracks to their discography.

There certainly seems a lot to unpack in Father Of The Bride, and at times there almost seems too much crammed into the album.

At 18 tracks and 58 minutes, Father of the Bride is by far the longest release by a band whose brevity was once one of their best characteristics. This results in a not-insignificant amount of bloat, including at least one or two songs—like the lounge jazz disaster “My Mistake”--that should have been left in the outtakes pile.

Father of the Bride does succeed in a musical sense-it could've done without the sparse synth ballad 2012 or the bastardized bossa nova of Spring Snow, to give a few examples, but most of these instrumental curios reaffirm Koening's reflective, and possibly solitary, approach to get back into the flow of writing music.

Father of the Bride may not be a band-defining or era-encapsulating double LP, but it is a positive step forward for a group that could have with little difficulty kept doing what it was doing.

What we’re left with is a stylistically stimulating album that further fleshes and mellows out the band’s peppy, preppy sound, shading it towards country music and acoustic stoner-rock--the sort of thing you might hear at, say, an impromptu Earth Day concert in a park.

It's every bit as immediate and listenable as it is confident, and more buoyant overall than the sombre Modern Vampires.... It's also flighty and so wide-ranging, at times it reads like a future compilation rather than the next step from a band now into their imperial phase. [June 2019, p.35]

Koenig’s apparent comfort in adulthood, the security and confidence in his newer lyrics--evokes this Facebook-notification angst on a grander scale, a musicalised alienation that prompts stark re-evaluation. It’s unfair to deny even our most beloved artists this progression and growth--they don’t owe us anything – but it’s difficult to be faced with a work that suggests they have grown past the confused state that we still feel rooted to.

It revels in pleasantness, peppered with quirky but cheerful touches that veil the mild unease expressed in the lyrics. In many ways, Father of the Bride sounds more like a singer-songwriter album centered on Vampire-in-chief Ezra Koenig rather than the interaction of a band.

Throughout Father of the Bride, a record with half-baked political commentary (“Something’s happening in the country / And the government’s to blame”) and lazy wordplay (“All I do is lose but baby / All I want’s to win”), it feels as if Koenig turned away from what made his band so great in the first place, instead electing to adopt a sound that doesn’t necessarily fit him, one that comes off as derivative and frequently boring.