Vampire Weekend - Father Of The Bride

Vampire Weekend return with shaggy, sprawling double LP!

Songs cover rebirth, contentment, and relaiming light

Vampire Weekend return with their fourth studio album, Father of the Bride. It's their first album in six years following 2013's well-received Modern Vampires of the City, and their first for Columbia Records.

Pitchfork calls Father of the Bride a "looser, broader album than Modern Vampires, the great sigh after a long holding of breath. There are still moments of conflict, but in general, you get the sense the band is just relieved to have run the gauntlet of their existential doubts and come out relatively unscathed, grateful to be here. A glass of wine? Why not. Make it white, and if you've got it, a little ice."

The music (produced again in part by Modern Vampires collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid, with a few cameos by Batmanglij) is accordingly sunny, celebratory, redolent at times of country, ABBA, lounge music ("My Mistake") and Brazilian jazz ("Flower Moon") and the barefoot exultations of Van Morrison ("This Life"). Just as indie bands like Pavement cautiously resuscitated the '70s rock that came before them, Vampire Weekend have resuscitated — or recolonized, you could say-the multicultural boomer sounds of the '90s, when bands such as the Gipsy Kings and the Chieftains moved into the American market, when the Indigo Girls and Rusted Root helped constellate a folksy alternative to the punk-derived sound of "alternative music."

For years, Vampire Weekend have implicitly threatened-in their perverse, contrarian, head-of-the-class way-to sound like Phish; Father marks the moment the threat becomes a promise.

Side 1

Hold You Now

Harmony Hall

Bambina

This Life

Big Blue

Side 2

How Long?

Unbearably White

Rich Man

Married in a Gold Rush

Side 3

My Mistake

Sympathy

Sunflower

Flower Moon

2021

Side 4

We Belong Together

We Belong Together

Spring Snow

Jerusalem, New York, Berlin

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