Vampire Weekend
3Arena
★★★★★
New York’s finest, funkiest Ivy Leaguers are back with a bang and a clatter of afrobeats, arpeggios and arty party sounds, and on Friday night they opened their European tour with a head-spinning indie-roots-disco celebration that left fans in more than a festive mood.
It’s been five years since Vampire Weekend last graced our shores – pre-Covid times – and it’s clear the band haven’t been spending the time baking banana bread. Their new album, Only God Was Above Us, is a record filled with superbly subtle tunes, and somewhat more digestible than their rather overcooked 2019 magnum opus Father of the Bride. Sixteen years on from their crisp, self-titled debut, these NY preppy boys, far from going a bit stale, are as vital a force as ever, and the new songs lend themselves beautifully to big-arena wigouts and fevered audience participation.
They’ve been reduced to the core trio of Ezra Koenig, Chris Biao and Chris Tomson since the departure of multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij in 2016 but they’re certainly far from diminished. They open the show modestly, with a simple band logo backdrop, and just the three of them onstage, but quickly get the party started with old favourites Campus and One (Blake’s Got a New Face). Guitarist/singer Koenig still looks boyish as he leads the electrified charge, with bassist Baio and drummer Tomson weaving in polyrhythms around Koenig’s choppy West Africa licks.
Soon the backdrop is dropped to reveal the rest of the touring band, who we knew were there all along. Ice Cream Piano, Classical and Connect blend Julliard music-school precision with loose, jerky alt-rock attitude; Vampire Weekend songs are usually built on simple, unfussy riffs and signatures that blossom out into a cornucopia of layered melodies and moods, taking you down unexpected routes into weird, wondrous new territory. Unbelievers, from their 2013 album Modern Vampires of the City, and the jittery This Life and Sympathy keep the faithful sweet.
The stage is set up like a tunnel construction site, the band wearing concrete-pale outfits and the stage crew sporting hi-viz jackets as they dash about like busy bees. It’s of a piece with VW’s New York state of mind – you could spend the whole night spotting Big Apple signposts, from Koenig’s Paul-Simon-in-Soweto vocal style to the avant-Afro stance guided by Stop Making Sense. A midpoint high point is a cover of Sbtrkt’s New Dorp. New York, which is stretched out like Grace Jones’s limo and twisted into all sorts of dance shapes, with blaring saxes, shrieking Adrian Belew-style guitars and sizzling techno stabs. You half expect Debbie Harry to come strutting out onstage to rap about eating cars.
Then it’s back to first principles with classics including the arch Oxford Comma, the ska-flavoured Ottoman, the crash-bang-wallop of Cousins and a delirious rendering of the perennial A Punk. Woven in among those are some of the best tracks from the new album, including a languid Capricorn, the siren-call of Gen-X Cops, the self-aware Prep School Gangsters and Mary Boone, a backhanded ode the to the 1980s New York art scene. It all ends on a high-life high note with Harmony Hall and the deep-forest folk drone of Hope.
For their encore, the band bravely invite audience requests for “anything but Vampire Weekend” songs. There follows an impromptu busking session as the band essay such a variety of oldies as Elvis Costello’s Alison, Billy Joel’s Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, The White Stripes’ Hotel Yorba, Bruce Hornsby’s The Way It Is and Wilco’s Jesus, Etc, with varying degrees of success. It’s a fun cover-version fail, but though they wisely keep Fairytale of New York down to a snippet played on the fiddle, and do a fair job jamming out Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl, it didn’t quite coalesce. No matter, though – they’d already delivered a performance worthy of all the greats. Don’t let the next Vampire Weekend pass you by.
