You’ll notice that, amidst the clang and pep of “Bambina,” Koenig all but admits he won’t stick around when the shit hits the fan. ![]() In this context, maybe his boast about being a rich man with a satisfied mind isn’t a sign of contentment so much as callousness. Meanwhile, “Harmony Hall” spies a serpent slinking through holy and consecrated spaces– the halls of power, God’s misty-wet garden, or whatever other hallowed place once thought incorruptible. And in the following “How Long?”– even its title suggesting a psalm of lament– Koenig has his eye on the rapidly-rising sea levels there’s no question as to whether we’re all drowning, there’s just the question of when. ![]() “Big Blue, for once in my life, I felt close to you,” he coos in “Big Blue,” a lover’s hymn for a dying world, voiced by a faithless paramour who’s come around too little, too late. And it’s the same world he laments in one song after another about ecological apocalypse. It’s the same world emblazoned on the album cover in glorious ClipArt chic Mother Earth.bmp, Lindsay Zoladz calls it. Trouble on the inside spills over to trouble on the outside, and while Koenig tries to find some direction in his one wild and precious life he witnesses the slow collapse of his one wild and precious world. Maybe he’s more like that rich man from the Bible than he lets on maybe he sounds so miserable here because he’s straining to squeeze through the eye of a needle. He may have been “born before the gold rush,” but what does it profit a man? When we encounter him on Father of the Bride, he’s sulking in the corner on his own wedding day (“crying in those rumpled sheets like someone’s ‘bout to die,” Haim appraises), bemoaning “this life and all its suffering,” apologizing to a forbearing partner for all his hand-wringing introspection (“all I did was waste your time”), and looking back ruefully on his gilded matrimony (“those wedding bells were ringing out our fate”). Koenig sings here of crumbling institutions, broken covenants, and shattered faith he sounds like a man who’s blessed but isn’t content, well-off but absent peace of mind. Maybe he’s telling the truth, but he certainly doesn’t sound happy on Father of the Bride, where nearly every one of the 18 songs weds major chords and a jubilant gait to lyrics laced with strychnine despair. Here, Koenig alleges that he’s perhaps the only wealthy man on the planet whose treasures have brought real satisfaction. That song is preceded by one called “Rich Man,” which might put you in the headspace of Jesus of Nazareth and a certain young ruler. “Time to disavow the gold rush,” he sings, “and the bitterness that’s flourished in its wake.” It sounds like a plan. But what’s really telling is that, on an album where the dominant mood is a kind of millennial malaise, a sad sack aloofness, it’s in this song that Koenig seems surest about how to move forward toward something like peace and contentment. “We got married in the gold rush/ And the sight of gold will always bring me pain,” Haim confesses. “Married in the Gold Rush,” a Grand Ole Opry-styled duet with Danielle Haim, is a song about a union consummated in prosperity but destined to ruin. ![]() Surely it is telling that the song on which the whole album seems to hang is one about forsaking wealth. That’s never been truer than on the long-gestating fourth Vampire Weekend album, Father of the Bride, which finds Koenig litigating that privilege ruthlessly, both through drollery (he had to have known what we’d say about a Vampire Weekend song called “Unbearably White”) and through jaundiced melancholy. There is a certain audacity to how this Ivy League indie guitar band with a white male singer has routinely pilfered from the African continent– a certain cultural immunity, even– but it’s to the enormous credit of Vampire-in-Chief Ezra Koenig that he’s generally handled his privilege responsibly. And if you remember that then you might also remember a song called “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” its title borrowing the language of Congolese dance music while also betraying the band’s upper-class roots. It’s been more than a decade since the release of their first album, but you can probably still remember the uniform of their earliest iteration to this day, no critic can mention them without also referencing the polo shirts and the boat shoes. To be fair, they’ve largely brought it on themselves. It’s hard to talk about Vampire Weekend without also discussing privilege.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |