Music Review: “Capricorn”/”Gen-X Cops” – Vampire Weekend 2024
On February 16th, 2024, for the first time since 2019’s Father of the Bride, Vampire Weekend released new music. For a certain type of millennial, me for instance, this was a big deal. I texted people about the songs. That’s how important this release was. It was not just me either. Vampire Weekend’s 2008-2013 run of albums – Vampire Weekend, Contra, and Modern Vampires in the City – provided the soundtrack to millions of people’s transition from teenage-dom into young adulthood. Hell, thanks to a quirk in the MP3 player programming, for a lot of people my age and older, “A-Punk” was the first thing they heard after starting their car in the morning. Always smart to have a song that starts with the first letter of the alphabet. Vampire Weekend was everywhere during that time, including in the soundtrack to multiple Judd Apatow movies. One of the last bands to make it big.
I still remember when I heard Vampire Weekend for the first time. I was sitting in my youth pastor’s car on the way to a winter weekend retreat at church camp. She played “Oxford Comma,” “A-Punk,” and then all of MIA’s Kala. A truly insane thing to play to a bunch of church kids on the way to a religious camp, but good for her, all that stuff slaps. I’ve seen both of them live. Vampire Weekend even sampled MIA on Contra, a kind of full-circle moment for me. Since that night I haven’t stopped listening to Vampire Weekend.
The band’s imperial period did not last forever. After Modern Vampires, the band took a bit of a hiatus, not releasing new music as a group until 2019’s Father of the Bride. Rostam Batmanglij, who along with Ezra Koenig formed the core of the band, left the group to work on his solo stuff. His absence led to a change in the sound on the divisive Father of The Bride. I say divisive because I hated that album, but a lot of critics and fans liked it. So maybe I’m just a grumpus. In my opinion, the album was not poppy enough, far too long, and particularly bare-bones instrumentation-wise. It had a “pretty” sound, with the band stripping away the slight aural rawness that made their earlier albums pop so much. It sucks.
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Despite my disappointment with their last album, I’ve still waited for new music from the group with great anticipation. Five years later we got some in the form of two songs – “Capricorn,” and “Gen-X Cops” – and the promise of a new album on April 5th. It’ll be called Only God Was Above Us, which is fine as album titles go. Tickets for the accompanying tour start at $300 and are quickly selling out, showing that they’ve still got the juice—or at least fans with deeper pockets. I’ve reviewed the first two songs below.
“Capricorn” – Based on Spotify plays, this is the far more popular of the two singles, sporting over two million to Gen-X Cops’s 800k-ish as of this writing. I guess I just don’t understand what other people like about Vampire Weekend. This song does not do that much for me. On a positive note, this song shows that they are moving away from what they did on Father of the Bride. There’s less willowy country-lite guitar noodling and more production experimentation, which I enjoy. It even has a Modern Vampires of the City-type piano line in the middle of it, that on a third or fourth listen can trick you into thinking you’re listening to a long-lost song off their eponymous album. The bass is rubbery in a pleasant way, and the song does some interesting things with static.
Other than those few bright spots, however, this song just sits there. Since Batmangali’s departure, Koenig has shown that he’s comfortable with chilling on a song, letting hit muses take him wherever they will. For much of “Capricorn” the bass and piano sort of burble along in a scenic way. Occasionally they pop into an interesting interlude, but then fall into the background, content to just hand out. The song goes on for over four minutes long and it feels it. There’s a great wall of sound effect in the second half of the song, but it doesn’t last long enough or come soon enough to make Capricorn interesting. A B- effort. Passing but wholly uninteresting.
Gen-X Cops – Now, this slaps. One of Vampire Weekend’s most explicitly political tracks, even looking outside the title. Koenig’s lyrics have always been obtuse enough that any political readings of his lyrics seem a reach. However, it’s hard not to read politics into it when the second verse and chorus are as follows:
Dodged the draft, but can't dodge the war
Forever cursed to live insecure
The curtain drops, a gang of Gen X cops assembles
Trembling before our human nature
It wasn't built for me
It's your academy
But in my time, you taught me how to see
Each generation makes its own apology
While Vampire Weekend is never going to be a Rage Against the Machine or Billy Bragg, this little extra political oomph from them in a song is nice to see. I’m not smart enough to do a close read on these lyrics or immediately recognize any references Koenig is making, but still, not bad. They’re political without being over-the-top obnoxious, which can’t be said about every political song.
Moving on to the actual music part. The production did a fantastic job on this song. The guitar sounds straight out of a Contra-era recording session and the lyrics from a Modern Vampires track. My sweet spot. The almost punk guitar line provides the main melodic thrust, backed with a wall of fuzzed-out vocals, piano, and some lush strings. I love a lush string. Much better than a barren string. Like the best Vampire Weekend songs, they stuff a lot of musical ideas into the song but manage to not make the whole thing a muddled mess. A beautiful maelstrom of sounds. There’s enough going on that it doesn’t feel like its run time of 3:47. I’ll be listening to this one a lot in the upcoming days.
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