Vampire Weekend online.
I’m cheating here because I wrote the track review of “Gen-X Cops” for Pitchfork. Check out the link for my initial thoughts. I really like “Gen-X Cops.” At first, I didn’t know what to think. Was this too much in my lane? Maybe because I’m one of those Vampire Weekend fans who love every album equally for different reasons. I’m at the perfect age where every Vampire Weekend album was the one I needed to hear at the time. Discovering Wes Anderson and “real” art as a Midwest high school freshman who was just getting into Pitchfork and being a snob and pretending that my inner life was richer and more sophisticated than it actually was (Vampire Weekend); reading enough music criticism to better understand the importance of beating the sophomore slump, becoming obsessed with music “narratives,” and that maybe Paul Simon was the most egregious thief of them all (Contra); looking upon my impending graduation from college and daydreaming of moving to New York to write and becoming a writer and imagining all the romance and romantic pain of being young and doing life (Modern Vampires of the City); and then daydreaming about maybe one day leaving New York after all my writing dreams came true and still having to stare into the white-hot void of life while also getting over my hate for Phish (Father of the Bride). I’ll have more to say about Only God Was Above Us when it comes out, but this feels right at home for my current “now living in LA and living all its romance and romantic pain while better appreciating and accepting that I’m now too old to die young” era. It’s a good era.
-Brady Gerber
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