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Vampire Weekend Reinvent Their Sound (Again) With ‘Only God Was Above Us’: Album Review
'Only God Was Above Us,' Vampire Weekend's fifth album, is a far-reaching but focused combination of pop hooks, punky energy and baroque grandeur.
A major problem with early success is getting past it — case in point, the cheerful bop of Vampire Weekend ’s first two albums and their image as peppy college boys who’d studied Paul Simon’s “Graceland” like a James Joyce masters’ thesis, playing their jaunty global pop to deliriously skanking millennials at seemingly every music festival of the latter aughts. The collaboration of Koenig and his primarily musical foil, co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Haim, Adele, Solange, Madonna, Charli XCX), which has developed over the band’s last three albums, is at a new peak, with sophisticated, scale-vaulting hooks and constantly shifting arrangements; the perky bounce of their early material, which made a couple of cameos on “Father of the Bride,” is nowhere to be found. “Prep School Gangsters” opens with the riff from the Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl”; there’s a hilarious “Goldfinger”-esque brass section on “The Surfer,” wild vocal effects on “Pravda” and a creepy kids’ choir on “Mary Boone” that’s followed immediately by a driving beatbox accompanied by a string quartet.
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