Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us review – Utterly wild and terrific

Now down to a core trio of Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio and Chris Tomson, following the departure, in 2015, of Rostam Batmanglij, the New York band Vampire Weekend are as smart as they come.

Released five years after Father of the Bride (a Vampire Weekend album in name only, as it marked Koenig’s debut as a solo artist), and recorded in stops and starts over that time frame, Only God Was Above Us may be boiling with ideas from the combined creative efforts of three musicians, but it never spills over.

“Cynical, you can’t deny it,” sings Koenig on the opening imploring track, Ice Cream Piano. “You don’t want to win this war ’cos you don’t want the peace…” The anxious pace continues from there and doesn’t stop to rest, but don’t dare to think it’s a straight line to the finish.

Classical is sweet summer soul music interrupted by blasts of Aladdin Sane-era David Bowie saxophone (sharp and shrill) and Mike Garson keyboards (avant-garde). Capricorn is an elegant art-pop piano ballad resting easily enough on a bed of nails. Connect starts like Franz Liszt and segues into Koenig bemoaning the loss of friendship (“You lost your peak, took acid in the park … Is it strange I can’t connect?”) before it returns to panicky piano fugues and fretful drumming. It is utterly wild and terrific.

Bowel cancer: ‘I truly know what it means to live and am genuinely loving life’

---

That They May Face the Rising Sun: The best Irish film in a very long time

---

‘When our last embryo failed, the clinic told us there was nothing more they could do for us’

---

Take That in Dublin review: ‘Whose idea was it to have stairs?’ puffs Gary Barlow as the band roll back the years with dazzling show

---

These and tracks such as Pre-School Gangsters (Kronos Quartet channelling Johnny Thunders), The Surfer (John Barry walking across Abbey Road), Pravda (aloha-aloha guitar riffs plucked straight out of the first season of The White Lotus) and Mary Boone (choral shouts and rippling piano) dig into the album’s themes of a bygone New York era.

The kicker is that they do so in ways that shed light not only on shifting cultural patterns, but also on how musicians can harness acute cleverness without losing sight of what should always be the end result: vibrant, inventive work.