Video: Vampire Weekend – “Gen-X Cops”
Directed by Drew Pearce. From Only God Was Above Us, out April 5 on Columbia.
In retrospect Father of the Bride was a disappointment. It was too long, too many guest vocals. It sounded “mature.” Boring. Maybe Modern Vampires of the City had set the bar too high and nothing they did could’ve lived up to it. Which kind of makes me think it might be time to give it another spin to see if it really does suck or if I was just heaping my own baggage and expectations onto it.
Regardless, they made us wait another five years since then before putting out something new so maybe this time it’ll be worth the wait. These first two songs are pretty dope. On first listen “Gen-X Cops” and “Capricorn” both sound more akin to Modern Vampires than anything on Father of the Bride. That’s not to say it sounds like a step backwards, but more like a return to form. The upside to waiting five or six years between albums is that everybody gets all excited for something new and forgets about the stuff that bugged them last time.
So I’m cautiously optimistic for Only God Was Above Us. These two songs are what I want my Vampire Weekend to sound like. Plus, the new album is only 47 minutes long, which is how long an album should be…so it can just barely fit on one side of a 90-minute tape. There’s also the whole thing about vinyl albums only being able to fit about 23 minutes per side at maximum fidelity. So there we go. Cross your fingers and hope the other eight songs are as good as these first two.
Continue reading New Vampire Weekend: Gen-X Cops and Capricorn