Only God Was Above Us
COLUMBIA
9/10
CLEVERNESS gets you only so far in life, and its limits become clearer with age. Vampire Weekend’s first album in roughly five years deals with that kind of reckoning. Its opening line: – spoken in context of a lovers’ sparring match, a geopolitical negotiation, maybe both. Ezra Koenig’s vocals are dirty with distortion, draped in coiled feedback, and they build to a panic attack of galloping drums, presto orchestral strings and guitar squeals amid talk of soldiers, police, war and weaponised language. The song, “Ice Cream Piano” (note the “I scream” homophone), is bunker-mentality neorealism, and quite a way from the on the band’s 2008 debut, blithely spilling kefir on an accessorising keffiyeh and second-guessing last night’s hookup en route to class.