Father Of The Bride is unlikely to find the universal praise that the immaculately constructed Modern Vampires did, but it will reward close listens. It’s not perfect, but it’s perfect for this moment in the band’s evolution.
Vampire Weekend’s first album in six years feels like a labour of love: 18 tracks running just under 60 minutes, a lot of them short and all of them sweet to the point that it feels like Vampire Weekend’s attempt at a song cycle.
Father of the Bride is so zealously detailed and meticulously contoured that you easily sink into its inventions.
More complex yet more direct than anything they've done before, Father of the Bride finds Vampire Weekend embracing change and delivering some of their most mature and satisfying music in the process.
Overall, Father of the Bride is an upbeat, inviting, and musically rich album.
Father of the Bride is a less satisfying listening experience than any of the imminently replayable, nearly flawless, Vampire Weekend, Contra, or Modern Vampires of the City. But its best songs reach, perhaps exceed, Vampire Weekend’s previous heights.
Father of the Bride may not have the initial excitement and glistening energy of the band’s now-classic first three albums, but it offers a rewarding and audacious achievement of its own.
Depending on your mood, there’ll be songs you’d happily lop off for a more streamlined listen, but by and large, all of these songs make the patchwork much more vibrant.
Now that they're mostly unburdened from the narratives of their past, Father of the Bride finds them at their most relaxed, jovial and inviting.
A giddy, sprawling fourth record, Father of the Bride heralds the dawn of a new era for Vampire Weekend.
This is not some grand tome where these indie vets try and break new sonic territory every track for better or worse. Here we see a bunch of thirty-somethings letting go of some past anxieties and leaning into newfound securities.
Its 18 tracks seem to belong in an august tradition begun by the Beatles’ eponymous 1968 release: the double album not as grandiose conceptual statement, but a crowded, loose scrapbook of ideas, not all of them fully baked.
For long stretches, Father of the Bride feels less like a studio album than the sort of demo trove usually unearthed decades after a rock band splits.
This 15-track double album is as joyous with its manipulation of sound as it is with its language.
A record drenched in a previously teased ‘spring-time’ vibe, it’s never less than crispy fresh, but while Vampire Weekend’s trademark peppiness is always present, it’s never afraid to head off in new, previously untested directions.
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.
Where the band’s three previous albums sounded like the byproduct of academic intellectuals fresh out of school, Father of the Bride feels more like an homage to pop with a decidedly more mature, domesticated California-leaning aesthetic.
It’s an album that exudes warmth and no little sonic familiarity, while reflecting what is a radically altered set-up.
Sure, Father of the Bride is messy and overlong—it lacks the sharp brevity of Vampire Weekend's first trilogy of albums. But it is also a smart, witty, comforting listen.
It’s an accomplished, meaty, interesting, original, colourful, textured record.
Vampire Weekend have expanded and re-contextualised their own creative universe, offered more questions than answers, taken new risks, and opened up new possibilities for their artistic future.
Father of the Bride does succeed in a musical sense ... but most of these instrumental curios reaffirm Koening's reflective, and possibly solitary, approach to get back into the flow of writing music.
Father of the Bride may not be a band-defining or era-encapsulating double LP, but it is a positive step forward for a group that could have with little difficulty kept doing what it was doing.
‘Father of The Bride’ is a mostly enjoyable and well-produced spring delight, a worthy entry into Vampire Weekend’s consistently surprising and brave discography.
Taken on its own terms ... Father of the Bride is generous with its rewards.
By no means a perfect album, Father of the Bride finds Vampire Weekend pulsing through another fine, finessed phase.
Father Of The Bride is the sound of a band boldly vaulting their perimeter fence; that they snagged their pants on the way over was perhaps inevitable, but is really no big deal.
If you’re willing to invest the time, there’s plenty to enjoy in Father Of The Bride. Although they may have been away for six years, it’s the sound of a band re-centring themselves.
Father of the Bride suffers the pitfalls of its double album length, and 5 or 6 tracks feel like filler; but its highs are tall and shining.
More than anything ... Father of the Bride is ... the most mild Vampire Weekend album. Where its predecessors were bratty or bullish, the band’s fourth album is largely warm, personal, and not a little pleasantly middle-aged.
Vampire Weekend embraces quantity over quality on Father of the Bride.
Now that we’re finally granted a listen to what he’s been working on for over half a decade, it’s simply impossible not to wonder what happened and where they lost their way, culminating in a major disappointment for perhaps the most anticipated indie rock album in recent memory.
What bogs Father of the Bride down is the feeling that there is just too much going on ... this record sounds like frontman Ezra Koenig’s attempt to reimagine the Great American Songbook as a manifesto of world peace and unity on a macro-scale large enough to be palatable for every person on the planet. In so doing, they have lost touch with what made them such a unique, enjoyable band in the first place.
#1 | / | Entertainment Weekly |
#1 | / | The Young Folks |
#1 | / | Thrillist |
#3 | / | The Observer: Kitty Empire |
#3 | / | Vulture |
#4 | / | Us Weekly |
#5 | / | GQ [UK] |
#5 | / | Stereogum |
#6 | / | BrooklynVegan |
#6 | / | Los Angeles Times: Mikael Wood |