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**Vampire Weekend - Father Of The Bride**
★★★★☆

Six years is a long time in pop music. When Vampire Weekend last graced us with 2013's *Modern Vampires of the City*, they were still that precocious Ivy League quartet who'd somehow made preppy cool again, turning Cape Cod weekends and Oxford commas into indie anthems. But time has a way of reshaping even the most carefully curated personas, and *Father Of The Bride* arrives as both a natural evolution and a gentle revolution – the sound of a band growing up in public while maintaining their essential charm.

The album's gestation was marked by seismic shifts. Multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij's departure in 2016 left a Rostam-shaped hole in the band's sonic architecture, forcing frontman Ezra Koenig to assume greater creative control. Rather than attempt to replicate their previous formula, Koenig embraced the change, crafting what he's described as a "summer album" – though one that captures the full spectrum of seasonal emotions, from sun-dappled euphoria to late-evening melancholy.

Clocking in at a generous 59 minutes across 18 tracks, *Father Of The Bride* is Vampire Weekend's most expansive statement yet. The album sprawls with the confidence of a band no longer concerned with fitting into neat categorical boxes. Where once they might have been pigeonholed as "indie rock with world music flourishes," here they've created something more akin to a sonic travelogue, touching on everything from country-tinged Americana to breezy yacht rock, all while maintaining their distinctive melodic sensibilities.

The opening salvo of "Hold You Now" (featuring Danielle Haim) immediately signals this broader palette. Built around a gently insistent acoustic strum and adorned with subtle strings, it's both unmistakably Vampire Weekend and refreshingly different – less angular than their earlier work, more embracing of space and silence. This newfound restraint proves to be one of the album's greatest strengths, allowing songs to breathe and develop organically rather than cramming every available sonic real estate with clever flourishes.

"Harmony Hall" stands as perhaps the album's finest achievement, a deceptively simple meditation on communication and miscommunication that builds from hushed verses to a gloriously cathartic chorus. The track's central metaphor – "I don't wanna live like this, but I don't wanna die" – captures the album's overarching theme of navigating adulthood's compromises with grace and humor intact. Similarly, "This Life" radiates the kind of effortless cool that made early Vampire Weekend so compelling, its circular guitar figure and talk-sung verses building to an absolutely irresistible hook that lodges itself in your consciousness for days.

The album's most adventurous moments come courtesy of tracks like "Bambina" and "Flower Moon," the latter featuring a gorgeous Steve Lacy guitar solo that adds unexpected R&B flavoring to the proceedings. These songs showcase Koenig's growing confidence as a collaborator, willing to cede space to other voices while maintaining the album's cohesive vision. Even when the experiments don't entirely land – "My Mistake" feels slightly undercooked despite its country-rock ambitions – they're undertaken with such obvious affection that criticism feels churlish.

Lyrically, Koenig has never been sharper. The album grapples with themes of commitment, responsibility, and the peculiar anxiety of contemporary existence without ever becoming preachy or overly earnest. His wordplay remains as dexterous as ever – "Jerusalem, New York, Berlin" is a masterclass in internal rhyme and cultural observation – but there's a new emotional directness that makes these songs feel lived-in rather than merely clever.

*Father Of The Bride* may lack the immediate impact of *Contra* or the conceptual cohesion of *Modern Vampires*, but it compensates with something arguably more valuable: the sense of a band comfortable in their own skin, willing to take risks without abandoning what made them special in the first place. In an era of increasingly fractured attention spans, Vampire Weekend have created something rare – a proper album experience that rewards both casual listening and deep dives.

Five years on, *Father Of The Bride* feels less like a creative detour than a necessary recalibration, proof that evolution doesn't require revolution. It's the sound of growing up without