Album Review - Modern Vampires of the City

"Wisdom's a gift, but you'd trade it for youth / Age is an honor, it's still not the truth"

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Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City is an album that makes me want to believe in God. On some mystical, subconscious level, it resonates with who I am deeper than most works of art I’ve read or seen. If I could be an album I’d want to be MVOTC. This blog is titled in reference to its opening track, after all.

While I still vividly remember the first time I listened to it back in 2016, I’ve never been able to point out what it is about this record that resonates so deeply. That’s because Vampire Weekend’s lyrics, while always witty and erudite, have never been straightforward. They’ve aimed to give listeners impressions of an idea, fleeting glimpses of a feeling, often creating a collage of words and phrases assembled from the writers’ lives and experiences that somehow add up to a greater whole.

And on MVOTC, they add up to a lot. Rooted in references to Judaism and New York City, this is an album mostly about belief, I think, about faith, disillusionment, existentialism, and a general sense of growing up and moving on from things. But it’s also somehow paradoxically an album filled with love and a sense of hope.

As one reviewer aptly put it, this is a “deeply God-haunted work”, with a “recurring sense of engagement with God throughout the album, a sense of wrestling with the implications and impossibilities of faith.”

I really don’t know how Vampire Weekend achieved the sound they did here either. Based on what I said above, you might think that this is a self-serious album that requires work and effort to listen to, but it’s actually just a collection of catchy indie rock songs, nothing too experimental or avant-garde. Ezra Koenig’s singing is immaculate, the instrument choices are zany and creative, and all the songs go really well together. But even beyond all that there’s just something else going on under the surface that gives this music serious heft and adds up to a sum greater than its parts.

To echo Dickens, it’s the happiest of records, it’s the gloomiest of records. It combines the anxieties of aging with the fresh breathlessness of being alive. It sounds modern yet feels ancient. It’s both exuberantly energetic and exhausted with worldly wisdom.

There’s perhaps no better example of these dichotomies than track three on the album, Step, which is also my favourite song ever made:

If there’s one thing we ask from music that no other medium can give us, it’s that it take us places within ourselves we’ve never been, inner-selves we didn't know even existed. Only music can touch us on an entirely new dimension, making us feel in ways that cannot be described using mere language. It’s rare but when it happens, it’s magical, and it’s what makes MVOTC a masterpiece. Whatever this album may be about, and it seems to be about a lot of things, in forty-two minutes it shows you something quietly precious, and you’re never the same.

Modern Vampires of the City to this day remains to me an inexplicably beautiful, esoteric mystery. The album’s charm lies not in trying to find any grand answers within its music, but in drowning yourself in the perplexing beauty of its questions.