Vampire Weekend - Father of the Bride

Pitchfork 80

Vampire Weekend return with a shaggy, sprawling double album all about rebirth, contentment, and the reclamation of light.

The Guardian 0

Their first album in six years sees VW integrating styles from country to flamenco into their preppy pop, often brilliantly

Six years ago, as Vampire Weekend released their last album, frontman Ezra Koenig reflected on their progress. “If people could look at our three albums as a bildungsroman,” he told the New York Times, “I’d be OK with that.” On one level, of course alt-rock’s premier chroniclers of preppy romance and wordy middle-class angst would start chucking 19th-century German literary terms around when asked to consider their oeuvre. On the other, Vampire Weekend’s first three albums did feel like a trilogy, covering a life from studenthood to late-twentysomething dread.

Related: Vampire Weekend review – smart, casual return for princes of prep-pop

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The Guardian 0

(Columbia)
The band’s first album in six years is both a callback to their preppy roots and a mature evolution of melting pot pop

“Copper goes green, steel beams go rust,” muses Ezra Koenig on 2021, a track contemplating the passage of time on Vampire Weekend’s fourth album, Father of the Bride. It has been six long years since the band’s last outing, the feted Modern Vampires of the City, which drew to a close a triptych of albums that found this group of Columbia University graduates cleverly fusing west African guitars and uptight east coast stylings.

The working title for the new record was Mitsubishi Macchiato – a parody, almost, of this guitar outfit’s signature metropolitan wit. But Father of the Bride is a summary that feels earned for the band’s return. Much of this generous 18-track double album – from the opener Hold You Now, with its prenuptial vignette, through to Married in a Gold Rush – riffs on love, weddings and churches. It’s an album that exudes warmth and no little sonic familiarity, while reflecting what is a radically altered set-up.

It’s a hilarious development: two metropolitan pop auteurs of Jewish descent going whole hog into heartland Americana