Age gracefully by aging goofily. That was the unexpected playbook that Vampire Weekend offered other indie-rock survivors at the Armory on Wednesday in downtown downtown Minneapolis. On the second night of a two-night stand, the NYC-launched, L.A.-based band supported some of the heaviest-hearted music of their career with a strikingly lighthearted set.
At 40, Ezra Koenig has assembled an ace touring band, one that handles like the musical equivalent of a sports car, and on Vampire Weekend’s current tour, he spends a quarter of the set each night leading it through unrehearsed covers thrown out by the audience, driving this metaphorical auto into traffic cones over and over, on purpose, just for the hell of it—a cool half-hour of whippin’ shitties in rock 'n’ roll’s parking lot.
“Is this the best part of the show or the worst part of the show?” Koenig asked us, and probably also himself, as the covers portion of the encore began to deteriorate They'd played a couple bars of “This Charming Man” and fielded a request for a cover of a reggae version of “The Beat Goes On” that Vampire Weekend once sampled. Pockets of the audience started a “Purple Rain” chant that was eventually accommodated.
The show began with Koenig sneaking out alone from behind a large black curtain, strumming the chords to “Hold You Now,” from 2019’s Father of the Bride. He may have even produced the first few notes before emerging. He gazed out across the audience with a conspiratorial grin—as though, by arriving onstage carrying an instrument, he was sharing a little secret with all of us, rather than doing exactly what we'd all paid to see him do.
Within a few bars, drummer Chris “CT” Tomson had joined in on the white drum kit roadies had set up in front of the curtain, and finally bassist Chris Baio materialized, the three of them attacking the song with a bashed, garage band intensity the recording lacks, shedding almost all of its production flourishes.
The trio—Vampire Weekend’s three remaining full-time members after the 2016 departure of multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij—played the first few songs of the night in this configuration, crowded to the front of the Armory’s very large stage as a power trio. But even on their opening song there were moments to indicate something more was going on, as an unseen pedal steel guitar swelled during short silences. A few minutes later, invisible 8-bit synth sounds surfaced on “One (Blake’s Got a New Face),” for which singer Wes Miles of openers Ra Ra Riot came out to recreate his backing vocals from the recording. After three songs, the curtain was lifted to reveal the four additional band members VW have touring with them behind this year’s excellent Only God Was Above Us, including a second drummer/percussionist, a second guitarist, and a couple of multi-instrumentalists who handled keys, sax, violin, and additional guitar as needed.
The newest edition of Vampire Weekend feels like an aesthetic synthesis after the rhetorical digression of 2019's Father of the Bride. That album flirted with jam-band signifiers, which were made explicit on the accompanying tour; the new album reminds many of 2013's Modern Vampires of the City in its lovingly scuffed soundscaping. FOTB turned VW into a solo project in the studio, and only Ezra showed up in the photos; for this one, all three guys are pointedly playing, being photographed and podcasting together.
The expanded lineup can pretty faithfully recreate all the sounds of the last two albums—Father of the Bride’s Californian warmth and crowded kitchen of collaborators, Only God Was Above Us’s gritty, clattering density. They embellished earlier material without altering the songs’ cores, fitting notes between existing notes, layers between existing layers, all feeling like logical extensions. There were brief double-drum flourishes, and a lush mix of live strings and keys where the old four-piece lineup would have relied entirely on Batmanglij to supply stripped-down renditions of their prominent chamber string arrangements. A guitar solo in place of the woodwind/piano bridge on “Unbelievers” brought the song into the newly distorted sound world of Only God Was Above Us, and the muscular full-band interplay helped some gentler Father of the Bride cuts fit into the whole.
There were two “phases” to the night, according to Koenig, although together the phases traced a pretty standard arc for a rock show. Vampire Weekend played pretty straight for the first half-dozen songs or so, with only minor tweaks to arrangements, then grew more adventurous as the night went on. The transition between phases was the most exploratory stretch of the night, with the band building into “Sympathy” out of a simple bass-led motif, hitting some tight full-band breaks where they would crescendo together, then crater into a sudden silence that would immediately be filled with frantic violin soloing. They seamlessly steered out of “Sympathy” into a four-on-the-floor groove that eventually built into a jam on “New Dorp. New York,” a 2014 track by the post-dubstep producer SBTRKT, for which Koenig had provided guest vocals.
During the set’s midsection they unveiled “Skattoman,” a not-so-surprisingly adept ska reworking of the beloved deep cut “Ottoman,” complete with melodica solo, which suggested VW could be a pretty good Two-Tone tribute band. (Overheard in the crowd when the melodica appeared: “Look, he’s got a harmonica… no, uh... a harmoni-board!”)
Vampire Weekend came up with and helped define a set of “big” '00s-era indie bands who seemed to want to think their way out of the less-desirable plot beats of the stereotypical rock band life cycle. These groups narrativized their own careers, openly strategizing about not just the albums they made, but how those albums related, in their discographies, to other albums in other bands’ discographies. Laborious Radiohead-aping sonic overhauls, lengthy and momentum-killing gaps between releases, formally and performatively quitting or disbanding in order to avoid either the “embarrassment” of touring into old age or the pitfall of creative falloff—bands who were once peers to Koenig & Co. tried all of these, and usually ended up falling into the traps they were trying to avoid anyway.
At this point, Vampire Weekend has lapped them all. They’ve done so by playing this game at a level beyond any of their contemporaries, while simultaneously opting out of it through their willingness to play with conventionally “uncool” ideas—and, quite simply, to be foolish.
The section after “Ottoman” during Wednesday night’s set illustrated something important: Vampire Weekend have a lot of great fucking songs. They ran “Diane Young” into “Cousins” into “A-Punk,” a three-song sugar rush sourced from three different albums. Brand-new songs like “Gen X Cops” and “Mary Boone” slotted in comfortably next to classics like “Hannah Hunt” and “Oxford Comma” before the regular set closed with a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Jokerman,” bisected by a lengthy and beautiful synth solo that sounded like the soundtrack to a jellyfish documentary (complimentary). (Semi-related: You can hear Koenig talk Dylan and the new VW album on the Jokermen podcast, whose co-host talked Dylan with Racket earlier this year.)
After this, they left the stage, came back, and launched into the aforementioned covers set. Their first request of the night? The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” (Koenig deadpanned that it is “very difficult to sing.”) And you know what? They did a pretty good minute of “Sabotage”! The next cover, Talking Heads’ “And She Was,” did not fare so well, and the picks were hit and miss from there, but that was the point. Just any band hacking through fragmentary covers for a half hour wouldn’t be anything special, but a band that just played you a full 23-song set studded with classics—they’ve earned your indulgence, haven’t they? This was the icing on the cake. Like, a lot of icing. Koenig put it best: “The show is over,” he said. “This is the afterlife.”
A Note About the Opener
I could easily write you an essay about my abiding love for Ra Ra Riot’s 2008 debut album The Rhumb Line, a small “c” classic which I think I’ve listened to every single year since it came out, but this isn’t the place for that. I will make an observation instead: “With Win Butler disgraced and Los Campesinos! on the comeback trail, it’s a great time for aughts indie rock bands with violins and/or cellos that aren’t Arcade Fire to get some overdue shine. Ra Ra Riot fumbled the bag here by leaving the string section at home and presenting themselves as a just-alright indie rock quartet of dudes for the night.
Setlist
Hold You Now
Holiday
One (Blake’s Got a New Face)
Ice Cream Piano
Classical
Connect
Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
Unbelievers
This Life
Sympathy
New Dorp. New York. (SBTRKT cover)
The Surfer
“Skattoman” (aka “Ottoman” and it’s the same, but it’s ska, so it’s not)
Oxford Comma
Capricorn
Gen X Cops
Diane Young
Cousins
A-Punk
Prep School Gangsters
Mary Boone
Hannah Hunt
Jokerman (Bob Dylan cover)
Encore
Sabotage (Beastie Boys cover)
And She Was (Talking Heads cover)
Seven Nation Army (White Stripes cover) (Ezra’s lyrics: “I’m goin’ to Wichita… I’m still in Wichita”)
Ramblin’ Man (Allman Brothers Band cover)
Santeria (Sublime cover)
Crash Into Me (Dave Matthews Band cover)
The Beat Goes On (Family Choice cover)
Don’t Look Back in Anger (Oasis cover)
Higher (Creed cover)
Happy Birthday (Ezra, to the birthday person in the audience: “Happy birthday dear… what’s your name?”)
Summer of '69 (Bryan Adams cover)
Purple Rain (Prince cover)
Walcott
