Vampire Weekend

Father of the Bride

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.

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.

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 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.

This 15-track double album is as joyous with its manipulation of sound as it is with its language.

A giddy, sprawling fourth record, Father of the Bride heralds the dawn of a new era for Vampire Weekend.

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.

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.

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’ is a mostly enjoyable and well-produced spring delight, a worthy entry into Vampire Weekend’s consistently surprising and brave discography.

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 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.

By no means a perfect album, Father of the Bride finds Vampire Weekend pulsing through another fine, finessed phase.

Taken on its own terms ... Father of the Bride is generous with its rewards.

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 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 suffers the pitfalls of its double album length, and 5 or 6 tracks feel like filler; but its highs are tall and shining.

Vampire Weekend embraces quantity over quality on Father of the Bride.

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.

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.