It’s been nearly six years since we’ve heard new Vampire Weekend material, and since then they’ve lost eclectic member, Rostam Batmanglij. No lie, I was a little nervous for this release. Even with the onslaught of singles released in the past couple months, I still wasn’t convinced this record would wow me.
Last week, when the album, Father of the Bride, finally dropped, I was pleasantly surprised. From a high level, I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it. Through 18 tracks, I felt this was perfect background music, sort of how like Friends is perfect background television. Every song was very mellow, not necessarily slow, but soft. I did really love that Danielle Haim was featured on so many tracks, my favorite being “Hold You Now.” On the opposite end of that, “Married in a Gold Rush” was ridiculous, and mildly terrible.
As I was ticking songs off the album, the title and cover art finally made sense to me. Ezra Koenig sings about marriage in the first handful of songs, then slides into nature dominating the subject matter. Even though the theme was consistent (and weird) throughout, the songs all seemed to inhabit a different style. If you randomly shuffled on this album, you’d get some country, jazz, pop, and true indie bangers.
All in all, the album was just random enough to be true Vampire Weekend, but it just didn’t totally resonate with me like past albums. Perhaps it’s me being a little nostalgic and a little stubborn. Or, maybe I just haven’t listened to some of their old stuff in so long for this to make sense. Either way, if I need to focus and still want to hear something nice, I’ll definitely be putting Father of the Bride on.