Vampire Weekend Only God Was Above Us Review: A Blast from the Past

While Vampire Weekend’s prep-school narratives have toyed with subcultural statements and big ideas about youth and love, singer and chief songwriter Ezra Koenig never seems to be revealing much about himself. That admittedly could make the sweeping emotions that the group’s songs tried to invoke feel trapped behind glass, even on a work of pop craftsmanship as stunning as 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City.

Vampire Weekend’s first album in five years and their first with (most of) their original lineup in more than a decade, Only God Was Above Us doesn’t tell us a whole lot more about the interior lives of Koenig, bassist Chris Baio, or drummer Chris Tomson. What it lacks in confessionals, though, it makes up for with a sharp conceit: a Cold War allegory about romance, contrasting references to conflict in Eastern Europe and Russia with domestic issues and memories.

In mounting this framework, Koenig also subtextually gets at a cannier truth: Experiences are messy in the moment but, in retrospect, can be neatly packaged into legible, consumable histories. “Sifting through centuries/For moments of your own,” he sings on “Capricorn.” This results in Vampire Weekend’s most thematically cogent work, if also its loosest sonically.

Only God Was Above Us sometimes dips into the chaotic, as on “Classical,” which crystallizes the album’s through line about our perception of the past. The lyric “How the cruel with time becomes classical” materializes as a thesis statement. It’s surrounded by a cacophony of waywardly strummed acoustic guitar, clattering drums, and an almost abrasive saxophone section that captures the din of the disorganized cruelty that society flattens and simplifies over time. These moments allow the band to sprawl out to a degree that they never have before, but their propensity for tight riffs and melodies still snap back into place on tracks like “Prep School Gangsters,” providing the theme’s counterpoint and evolution.

Opener “Ice Cream Piano” commences with a sputtering, unkempt guitar tone, soundtracking Koenig’s parallels of warfare and admonishing of a partner. Fittingly, the closing track, “Hope,” the longest song Vampire Weekend has ever released, decrescendos with a wave of whining guitar feedback after eight minutes of Koenig describing a war ending and repeating, again and again, that he hopes his former lover has let go. Just before the song ends, the haze of feedback dissipates—a sign that the bedlam of history is being resolved with a nostalgic glow.

Still, Only God Was Above Us is ultimately just another (very good) Vampire Weekend album rather than a radical shift. It essentially sees the band dressing up their patented medium-paced, occasionally frantic, symphonic rock in see-through disguises. Everything is more vintage sounding: the guitar tones are gruffer and grainier (especially on “Gen-X Cops” and “Capricorn”) and the pianos are sped up and looped on tracks like “Connect” and “Mary Boone,” the latter of which is a pale imitation of 2013’s “Hannah Hunt.” Koenig’s voice is still a gorgeous, well-enunciated and utterly suis generis silver-spoon treat, though it’s lathered in a liberal amount of reverb, and as such it frequently sounds like he’s singing in a tunnel.

Even though Only God Was Above Us is a continent-spanning Cold War yarn, Vampire Weekend can’t help but return to recollections of youthful transgression in their home base of New York. “Pravda” (whose title, as the song tells us, is the Russian word for truth) flits back and forth between the Soviet Union and the Midwest before it recedes to a first-person memory of working in a tie shop in Penn Station. More than most, this is a band magnetically pulled toward the sounds, images, and aesthetic that define them.