Here, Vampire Weekend echoes New Order’s versatility, rhythmic ingenuity, and its romantic-social undercurrent. (“I take myself too serious / It’s not that serious.”) What once was an underground or subcult genre offers irresistible expiation via this track - that’s what pop music is for.Ĭomposer-vocalist Ezra Koenig (age 35) takes the idea of emotional reparation in “Sympathy” from one of Britain’s great post-punk bands, New Order, who revolutionized politicized dance pop in the Eighties and Nineties (with such devout political recordings as “Temptation,” “True Faith,” and “Technique”). This dance track releases their frustration and their aspirations.

“I didn’t have your sympathy / But I knew where to start / Explaining to you patiently / That the one who broke my heart / Would have broken yours / And thrown the pieces in the river.”Īccompanied by reverberating rhythm, these lyrics explain the political experience that confounds our age: so many aggrieved people feeling unfulfilled and betrayed by past political choices that they no longer identify their national or humane commonality. But Vampire Weekend brings back sensitivity through musical vibrancy the erotic-kinetic impulses of dance pop are used as a model for communication - what politicians used to call “crossing the aisle.” This rumbling dance track is a rubric: While urging fans to dance, it also widens their sense of fellow feeling, a virtue that has been lost in our current political upheaval. In “Sympathy,” the double album’s midway track, this New York–based band put forth its expectations of listeners - those Millennial pop fans now at the forefront of the culture who justify the pleasure of their lifestyles by their presumed political awareness. But Father of the Bride’s delight comes from its openly relevant complexities. You may have given up listening to pop music for being irrelevant, a product of the era’s fame-seeking moneygrubbers robotically asserting liberal inanities.

I commend this album to your attention for the richness of its melodic variety and its surprising emotional and political expression. It’s easily Father of the Bride by the impetuously named Vampire Weekend. To answer the question: What is the best pop album of 2019?

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