“This is going to be a very conversational show,” Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig warns a sold-out crowd, after racing to a stop with Unbelievers. “Is that OK with you?” On the first of three nights in London, he is explicit that this mini-tour is a warm-up as they prepare for the release of double album Father of the Bride, their first LP since 2013. Glastonbury and a tour of bigger venues will follow. For now, Koenig – the poster-boy of indie prep, down to the pink chinos rolled above the ankle to show off sandals with socks – seems keen to manage expectations.
Fans seem happy just to be there, shrilly singing along with the bubbling guitar of Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, rattled off just as it appeared on Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut 11 years ago. Technical accuracy is nothing to be sneezed at, especially with songs as precisely calibrated as Vampire Weekend’s. But their signature wry Ivy-league take on west African highlife guitar has aged. Were it to debut now, the balance would probably be tipped from approving comparisons to Graceland to criticisms of cultural appropriation. Koenig’s wide-eyed, slightly theatrical delivery – all palms on chest and eyes turned to the heavens – seemed to present it at an ironic remove, maybe to inoculate it against the effects of time. It has been five or six years since Vampire Weekend last played London, he says, to the crowd’s audible dismay. “What’s that? We waiting too long? Let’s not dwell on the past.”
Indeed, the band seem to want to immerse themselves in newer material. The skittish new single Sunflower unexpectedly balloons into a King Crimson-esque guitar solo by Brian Robert Jones (new to the band as of this tour, and a consistent highlight of this show), then takes an unexpected turn towards thrash metal. It is more Vampire Weekend head-over-heart irony, prompting laughs as well as head-banging from the audience, but all the more engaging for being slightly less buttoned up. Likewise, New Dorp. New York – Koenig’s 2014 pacy electro-funk track with SBTRKT – later sprawls into a wah-wah-heavy jam.
The wheels, however, wobble with 2021, another new release, where Koenig struggles to find his pitch against the relatively sparse backdrop of pulsing synth chords. “This is a little bit of an attended rehearsal,” he says. “That’s how these first shows always happen.” A gentle slide-guitar slow burner, Hannah Hunt, gets off to a similarly haphazard start, finding its footing only with the dynamic change in the final third. The higher-energy, denser, well-drilled songs such as Diane Young – with its surf guitar run that the late Dick Dale could have heard himself in – and A-Punk manage to pull the seven-piece back in line, and that earlier easy confidence returns in full for Oxford Comma.
These are all fan favourites, and Koenig gives the five-song encore over to audience requests Finger Back, Everlasting Arms and M79, after some back-and-forth. “I said it was going to be a conversational show,” he reminds us. It’s certainly casual, but not at the expense of enjoyment. As he says, they’re still getting into the swing of things – and for many it is simply enough to have them back.
• At Islington Assembly Hall, London, 22-23 March. Also touring in November.
