Music Monday: Vampire Weekend, Charles Lloyd, and Ava Mendoza

I’ve had the latest Vampire Weekend album, Only God Was Above Us, on heavy rotation over the last few weeks. At first, I’ll admit that I didn’t get it. I found it too sonically confusing and even gratuitously distorted to appreciate, but I persisted. I’m not sure why I persisted other than out of a kind of lazy (and honestly distracted) commitment to the latest thing.

After about a half-dozen listens, something started to click for me and without spoiling the album for someone who hasn’t heard it (or enforcing my read on the album as normative), I’d encourage anyone who likes power pop (or catch alternative or whatever one wants to call it) to check it out. To my ears, I feel like it is paean to the Millennial experience (which is known to me primarily through my experience with college students). In some ways, it feels like a sequel to Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs which in some ways is a Gen X album. 

Check out two cuts from Side A:

Capricorn: 

https://youtu.be/8lCmyFCj580?si=35cIOQs-PlmMcolj

Too old for dying young, to young to live alone.

And, “Prep-School Gangster”:

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, I was sucked into a strange Kool & The Gang vortex over the weekend. I caught the very end of an unfamiliar version of Charles Lloyd’s “Sombrero Sam” on the radio and discovered that it was, in fact, Kool & The Gang playing it in 1971 and releasing it on their album of the same year, Live at P.J.’s. 

Lloyd released what I consider to be the classic version of this song on his 1966 Quartet date Dream Weaver:

He has returned to this song from time to time, and I particularly enjoy his 2016 recording with the Marvels from I Long to See You.

Finally, I’ve been enjoying the newest from guitarist Ava Mendoza and saxophonist Dave Swenson album, Of It But Not Is It on Mahakala Music (whose releases almost always excite me)! It’s bluesy, dirty, improvised and edgy. It’s my kind of music (and features two William Parker songs). Mendoza’s guitar and Swenson’s sax are plenty to create rhythm and drive.