Vampire Weekend’s <em>Father of the Bride</em> Is an Ambivalent Epic About World Peace

Remember world peace? It’s been a while since that dream was so common as to be a punch line. Beauty queens now skip the pleas for global harmony and instead get specific about Latin American territorial disputes. The peace symbol was initially designed to rally for nuclear disarmament, one of the many international consensuses unraveling lately. Peace as a cultural obsession, a meme, belongs to other eras: the hippie marches of the ’60s and early ’70s, and the end-of-history mirage of the ’90s.

Vampire Weekend’s is an album about world peace, which might explain why it uses very styled like something that , or that AOL would have put on a CD for 500 hours of free internet. Intricate roots guitardraws not only from Boomer bands—the single “This Life” is nearly a remix of Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl”—but also from Clinton-era buskers such as Blind Melon and Counting Crows.When Ezra Koenig name-checks “Simple Twist of Fate,” it seems as much a reference to the Bob Dylan classic as to its rendition on the 1991 self-titled album by the Jerry Garcia Band. Tie-dye is yet , and Vampire Weekend are the nu, nu flower children.