Vampire Weekend Reinvent Their Sound (Again) With ‘Only God Was Above Us’: Album Review

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music A major problem with early success is getting past it — case in point, the cheerful bop of Vampire Weekend’s first two albums and their image as peppy college boys who’d studied Paul Simon’s “Graceland” like a James Joyce masters’ thesis, playing their jaunty global pop to deliriously skanking millennials at seemingly every music festival of the latter aughts.

And although that take was understandable — if unfairly reductive — at the time, VW is now a very different band. “Only God Was Above Us” — their first album in nearly five years and just their second in the last decade — finds them bringing their vast musical pedigree to create a sound that they’ve touched on in the past but never previously explored so thoroughly.

That sound is an unusual fusion of baroque-esque grandeur — first aired on their 2013 song “Step” — and punky energy that’s in full display on this album’s first song, “Ice Cream Piano.” On it, a string quartet jars against a comically distorted, shrieking guitar — and throughout the album, such disparate elements are often playing at the same time.

It still sounds unmistakably like Vampire Weekend — the band has become increasingly singer-songwriter-guitarist Ezra Koenig’s vehicle (especially since cofounder Rostam Batmanglij left in 2016), and the songs all are built around his effortlessly memorable melodies and deceptively plaintive voice.