'Vampire Weekend': the vampire dance returns

One night in March 2010, Vampire Weekend performed in Barcelona presenting what was then their second full-length,

Contra

. After the concert they went for a walk through the city center and a girl, who was heading towards a birthday party that was taking place on Jovellanos Street, crossed paths with them and recognized them. She told them about the party, and that in the room were the instruments with which a group of friends had performed a while before. The then quartet—now a trio, Rostam, guitarist and composer, left the band at the end of the last decade—went up to the house and improvised a performance. What cool guys. After playing two songs from their first album, they greeted the respectable person and left. They didn't even drink a beer. How stale. This story explains a lot about the nature of the New York band, perhaps the most wonderfully contradictory entity that independent pop has produced this century.

Almost three decades have passed since that night, and along the way Ezra Koenig's band have delivered their best (

Modern Vampires of the City

) and their worst album (

Father of the Bride

), but above all they have seen how all the elements that defined their idiosyncrasy, and which were then seen as friendly, candid and even aspirational, have been culturally questioned, if not directly demolished. Young white and mostly Jewish people from private school, uniformed like Ivy League students, halfway between a Ralph Lauren advertisement and Minghella's Ripley, without fear of appearing pretentious or sounding intellectual - on their first album there was a song called 'Oxford Comma', or serial comma—and with a sound whose main reference was Paul Simon's

Graceland

, a (wonderful) album recorded in 1986 in South Africa, in the middle of apartheid, and for which it seems that the term appropriation was invented cultural. In short, the world has not only turned against them, it could be said that it has collided against them.

The band's new album has no high points. More than anything, because it hardly has any flaws. And, if it has them, they cannot be heard

All this could explain why this

Only God Was Above Us

revolves around the past, the way of managing it, assuming it and even remembering it, because to look forward we all get very creative, but when it comes to looking back we are left

From their home in Los Angeles, they observe the New York before 9/11, the one of their adolescence, the one that people like them would end up gentrifying, in tributes to very Vampire Weekend figures such as the art dealer and tax evader Mary Boone in the issue which bears his name. Or in brilliant generational disquisitions like the one offered in another high point of the album, 'Gen X Cops'. Although, the truth is, this album has almost no high points, mostly because it has almost no flaws. And, if it has them, they cannot be heard. From the nervous and exciting 'Ice Cream Piano' to that final litany of 7 minutes and 56 seconds titled 'Hope', which contains another of those phrases that count a lot and is valid for almost everything: “The enemy is invincible,” Koenig repeats until finish the album.

Along the way, eight impeccable cuts, in which those Vampire Weekend who learned

Graceland

by heart come across jazz or even

trip hop,

but, above all, they find some of the best compositions of their career and also with the best and most creative ideas for fixing and producing them that they have ever had.

Vampire Weekend 

Only God Was Above Us 

Columbia / Sony

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