A year ago, Vampire Weekend released their most ambitious, worst album. “Uneven, normalized, and normative, Father of the Bride approaches record making as an interrogation of their prejudices and preferences as well as their audience’s, hence the mess, for we like marriage, awkward rapping, and horns too,” I wrote at the time. I will not add to what I wrote because nothing has changed other than my liking Danielle Haim’s vocals and Chris Baio’s bass pokes a little more. Maybe Baio didn’t play those lines; Remain in Light‘s credits remain a fascinating sociocultural study in copyright, authorship, and the limits of improvisation. But the way Father of the Bride addresses domesticity and listening to records and reckoning with identity? Sorry — it’s smart. It’s their worst album. Their twee-est. But they try.
Meh
We Belong Together
Hold You Now
Sunflower
Sound, Solid
Big Blue
How Long?
Stranger
Spring Snow
2021
My Mistake
Rich Man
Flower Moon
Good to Great
This Life
Jerusalem, New York, Berlin
Harmony Hall
Married in a Gold Rush
Sympathy
Unbearably White
Bambina
Humanizing The Vacuum 