Albums: Only God Was Above Us

 

Released on 5 April, "Only God Was Above Us" is the fifth studio album by indie band Vampire Weekend, the album marks the third collaboration between the band and their longtime producer Ariel Rechtshaid, and the first album recorded as a trio after the departure of Rostam Batmanglij in 2016. 

 

The vocalist Ezra Koenig began to write the lyrics for the new album, between 2019 and 2020, with primary recording sessions took place in many locations as Manhattan, Los Angeles, London and Tokyo, and co-producing the album by Koenig and Ariel Rechtshaid.

 

Drawing inspiration from a 20th., century New York aesthetic with its title derived from the May 1st., 1988 headline from the New York Daily News article, and with an artwork photographed by Steven Siegel, This article recounts the incident involving Aloha Airlines Flight 243, in which a structural failure caused the aircraft's roof to be torn off mid-flight. The phrase "Only God was above us" was quoted from one of the passengers.

 

The album has been described as direct yet complex, showcasing the band at its grittiest, most beautiful, and melodic, although the band has never made a bad album after all, this one is considered their best work so far, or at least one of their best. The songwriting is less compact and urgent, and the sound is looser, hazier, more free. "Only God Was Above Us" as a treatise on inheritance, decay, generational dissonance, and the delicate idea of choosing optimism over defeatist grousing. The album opens with Koenig singing, "Fuck the world" his voice soft, almost trembling. But it turns out that he’s merely quoting someone who’s got himself mired in a self-fulfilling fear spiral. The song, "Ice Cream Piano" (on the lyric sheet, the titular phrase appearis noisy but buoyant. “We’re all the sons and daughters / Of vampires who drained the Old World’s necks, then the brilliant and charming "Classical" stands alone and prepares the mood for the rest of the album, with "Capricorn" the band offers a big hazy tune featuring sinthesizers, piano, guitar, harmonica and strings, and one of the first single released from the album so far. 

 

Other awesome tracks are the "Gen-X Cops" named after a Japanese action movie released in 1999, the cover of which will be familiar to anyone who haunted downtown video stores before the advent of streaming. Another song takes its name from a New York magazine cover story from 1996, titled “Prep-School Gangsters,” in which the journalist Nancy Jo Sales bums around Manhattan with a crew of trust-fund dirtbags, "The Surfer" Koenig refers to the construction of Water Tunnel No. 3, a New York City water-supply tunnel that broke ground in 1970 and will be completed, it’s estimated, in 2032.

 

The final track is "Hope" and its a eight-minutes song that inventories various wrongs an individual or a society can endure, then suggests that we’d better find a way to let our rage evanesce. It’s a notion—surrender. 

 

The album received a well-acclaim from critics, considered one of the band's best album, honest and creative record, encapsulating Koenig at his best masterful way. 

Only God Was Above Us Track List:

1. Ice Cream Piano

2. Classical

3. Capricorn

4. Connect

5. Prep-School Gangsters

6. The Surfer

7. Gen-X Cops

8. Mary Boone

9. Pravda

10. Hope