Photo of Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig by Bryan J. Sutter
Vampire Weekend has stretched in many stylistic directions over their five-album career, but one word comes to mind when describing their songs: ornate. There’s just a lot going on in the average Vampire Weekend song, a lot of layered instrumentation and sonic elements placed just so; even the songs on the album where they embraced their jam band side (2019’s Father of the Bride) were still pretty fussy. Given all that, it was a joy to see just how loose Vampire Weekend was in their set at Saint Louis Music Park, how in the pocket they were and how willing they were to follow the night wherever it led them.
Their set started with the band’s three remaining founding members—singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig, bassist Chris Baio, and drummer Chris Tomson—taking a giddy run through the bopping “Holiday” in front of a simple big, black backdrop with “VAMPIRE WEEKEND” spelled in big white block letters. “Holiday” gave away the game a little bit—we only saw those three members and their three instruments but we definitely heard some horns in the background. First album gem “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” followed, giving each member a chance to showcase their instrumental chops as the complex guitar, bass, and drum parts all interlocked flawlessly. (A family was seated in front of us, with two young girls standing on their chairs and every bit as excited for the show as mom and dad. On this song, the younger daughter—maybe 7 years old?—very theatrically pulled her bucket hat down over her ears for each F-word, though of course all that did was reveal that she knew exactly when each swear word was coming. It was adorable.) The tempo kicked up several notches for the early-career rarity “Boston (Ladies of Cambridge),” the lights dropping for the song’s outro as Koenig was lit starkly from below, delivering his lyrics as if they were a spooky story told over a campfire.
Then the band shifted to newer territory with a trio of songs from their fantastic latest album, Only God Was Above Us. “Ice Cream Piano” opened with a slow burn, the big black curtain finally dropping after the first verse to reveal the full stage backdrop (which was sort of like peering down a massive distorted 3-D subway tunnel) as well as the rest of the seven-piece band, adding (generally speaking, though there was plenty of instrument swapping) a second guitarist, a second drummer, keyboards, and saxophone. The sax took centerstage on “Classical” with a solo so totally tubular that even the screens on the side of the stage went full ‘80s with old school double exposure effects. A woman in tall boots came out on stage to briefly dance on the drum riser for what I’m pretty sure was the only time of the night, a very random aside that distracted from the fact that both Tomson and second drummer Kenny Bernard were playing some of the most complicated stuff I’ve ever heard over the top of each other without ever losing either the beat or the groove. It was kind of unreal. Koenig put down his guitar for “Connect,” crooning the song like it was a jazz standard, even leaving room in the back half of the song for extended piano and bass solos.
“White Sky” (from 2010’s Contra) took its time to get started, Koenig playing a lengthy arpeggiated guitar figure as the band gradually added the other instruments into a groove that subtly morphed into the song’s recognizable opening after a minute or two. It was a dynamic performance, with a nice rise and fall in energy level as the song shifted between verse and chorus, wonderfully accented by Ray Suen’s pedal steel. “This Life” got the biggest reaction from the crowd thus far, a note perfect recreation of the sunniest sounding song ever to be written about “Life/ And all its suffering.” Despite being a radio hit, “Step” didn’t quite achieve the same liftoff; even the crowd singalong for the last chorus felt oddly muted.
“Phase 2 has begun,” Koenig joked as a new backdrop fell from the rafters to obscure the subway tunnel, this one featuring a bearded face wearing 3-D glasses. “What does it mean? No one knows,” he joked. He then went on to reminisce about Vampire Weekend’s last visit. “You know what night it was,” he began—and of course, all good St. Louisans remember it was the night the St. Louis Blues won the Stanley Cup championship, which Vampire Weekend celebrated at the time by covering the Blues’ winning theme, Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.” Koenig joked it was “the only time it felt good to look out and see everyone looking at their phones.”
“Sunflower” then followed, a highlight from the band’s aforementioned jam band period—or, as my compatriot, fellow The Arts STL contributor Mike Rengel, so eloquently put it, “This is the part of the show where they kind of sound like the Dave Matthews Band.” This was true from the get-go, but especially so when the competing violin and sax solos showed up. Baio had a little fun with it too, playing the underground theme from Super Mario Bros. on his bass.
From there, “phase 2” seemed like a study in contrasts between the band’s latest songs (8 of the album’s 10 tracks were featured) and their earlier material. On the older front, “M79” and “Oxford Comma” sounded sparse compared to the new songs, while “Diane Young” was downright raucous and “A-Punk” brought out the biggest reaction in the crowd all night, the band clearly looking like they were having a blast as the audience shouted along. As for newer songs, the tempo was comparatively cooler for “Pravda,” accented with pedal steel (“one of the all-time great American inventions,” Koenig enthused) that was sunny, not sorrowful, with a nice groove. “Capricorn” was also a chance to breathe, with big walls of guitar that just washed right over the audience. Slipped into this portion was another relative rarity, the “Holiday” b-side “Ottoman,” in an arrangement the band cheekily refers to as “Ska-ttoman” that featured ska-style upstroked guitars and sax straight out of Huey Lewis and the News, with even a bit of melodica. Sadly, no one yelled to “pickitup pickitup pickitup.” Another new tune, “Mary Boone” featured a hip-hop beat that sounded huge in a live setting, plus a nice bit of clarinet to wrap up the song. The main set wrapped with an impeccable performance of the band’s very best song (that would be “Harmony Hall,” and no, I will not be taking any questions) and “Hope,” a piano-driven folk song that was very pretty but dragged a bit as it went on, though the extended outro was wonderfully executed as each band member dropped out one-by-one until only Baio remained on stage to play the song out, lights emitting from the subway tunnel like an oncoming train.
“That was the show,” Koenig joked as he returned to the stage, “you can relax!” The band took the encore in an unexpected direction, not playing the hits but taking requests—“anything but Vampire Weekend” requests. People would shout out songs or hold up signs or their phones with the song titles in big block letters, and anything that struck Koenig’s fancy, they’d give it a shot. They got off on the right foot with the ebullient soul classic “Build Me Up Buttercup” by the Foundations, the Modern Lovers classic “Roadrunner,” a few bars of Deee-Lite’s classic “Groove Is in the Heart,” and a bit longer of a run through the Four Seasons’ “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night).” (“Apologies to the Jersey Boys,” Koenig cracked.) The band even took another stab at “Gloria” (maybe a smidge better than their attempt five years ago). The covers kept coming. The Beatles’ “Dear Prudence.” Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life.” The Grateful Dead’s “Cumberland Blues.” (There’s that jam band stuff again…) Beyoncé’s “Hold Up.” A surprisingly tender run through Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville.” “Is this the best part of the show or the worst part of the show?” Koenig laughed, then concluded, “It’s beyond the binary of good and evil.” And it was indeed beyond good and evil—it was downright magical. These were ramshackle covers, the band playing as much of each song as they could recall (generally the first verse and the first chorus) as best they could. But it was so much fun. It went on for about 20 minutes but I would have gladly watched it for an hour. And I wasn’t alone in that assessment—despite the awful, awful traffic that always awaits at the end of a Music Park show, very few people in the crowd left. The only disappointment was Koenig didn’t hear the shouts from the back for a cover of “Hot in Herre.” (It was, indeed, hot in therre—Music Park usually has a pretty nice cross-breeze even on a brutally hot day, but this day the air was stagnant, humid, and downright sticky. Still worth it.)
Someone requested one Vampire Weekend radio hit that hadn’t made the setlist so far, “Unbelievers,” and band dutifully blasted through one verse and chorus before stopping as they had with most of the other cover snippets—“We take the setlist seriously,” Koenig deadpanned. One more snippet—“Dangerous Night (The Night is a Knife),” in only its second-ever performance if setlist.fm is to be believed—closed out this section, Koenig thanking the audience for their requests with “You’re helping us become like a B-list wedding band.” The encore wrapped with two full songs from Modern Vampires of the City—the rocket-fast strumming of “Worship You” and the arena-sized, almost Coldplay-esque “Ya Hey,” the song’s weirdly pinched robot vocals repeated like a mantra to take us out into the hot, sticky St. Louis night.
Opening the show was Ra Ra Riot, who came out of an extended hiatus strictly to open this run of Vampire Weekend shows. (Koenig and RRR frontman Wes Miles are childhood friends and were frequent musical collaborators in their pre-fame days.) The scope was scaled back from Vampire Weekend’s but Ra Ra Riot’s sunny vibes matched the headliner’s wonderfully, and the band sounded strong and sturdy despite the five-year-long break. | Jason Green
