Vampire Weekend has chosen the latter.
Friday night’s sold-out stop at the Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory, the band’s first North Texas gig in almost five years, was a nearly two-and-a-half-hour odyssey of pleasurable peculiarities that built and swerved and danced and blossomed, confounding assumptions at nearly every turn.
The New York City-founded alt-rock group catapulted from blog buzz to mainstream ubiquity in the late 2000s, and the Ezra Koenig-led collective — retaining an additional two founding members but adding in multiple touring musicians — is bearing down on two decades of activity.
Touring behind its recently released album Only God Was Above Us, the band arguably seems spryer now than when it debuted.
Even the staging subtly nodded at Vampire Weekend’s evolution. To begin the night, Koenig, drummer Chris Tomson (whom Koenig affectionately referred to as “CT” throughout the evening) and bassist Chris Baio filtered out in front of a banner stretching the length of the stage and reaching up into the rafters, bearing only the band’s name.
Ezra Koenig kicked off the show alone and was slowly joined by the core members of the band.
Andrew Sherman
As “Ice Cream Piano,” from Only God Was Above Us, got underway, things expanded dramatically. The Vampire Weekend banner disappeared with a flourish, revealing the expanded touring version of the band — keys player Will Canzoneri, percussionist Garrett Ray and multi-instrumentalists Ray Suen and Colin Killalea — standing in front of what looked like the opening to an enormous underground tunnel (perhaps related, perhaps not: the stage crew was adorned in reflective vests and hard hats with headlamps).
The septet was airtight throughout: Baio could not help but contort his body along with the rhythms, as the tireless Tomson and the multi-instrumentalists arrayed behind Koenig added muscle and texture and propulsion to even the most sedate tunes.
The first inkling that Koenig and his bandmates might be unfurling some weirdness came during “Classical” — one of many new songs featuring a typically exquisite Koenig bon mot: “Untrue, unkind and unnatural/How the cruel, with time, becomes classical” — as an interpretative dancer, unannounced and unacknowledged by anyone on stage, made an appearance mid-song.
“We’re so happy to be back,” Koenig said as “Classical” concluded. “When you see a show at the Toyota Pavilion, is it weird to hear Dallas?” (Koenig began the night by greeting Irving, before noting his cousins from Fort Worth were in attendance — the audience’s preference for being addressed as Dallas was adhered to for the remainder of the show.)
A blistering stretch of beloved and newer material — the ambitious, grand “Capricorn,” “Connect,” the glittering, stuttering reggae of “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” “Step” and the buoyantly grim “This Life” — was capped by Koenig peeling back his tan jumpsuit to reveal a tie-dyed Buc-ee’s T-shirt underneath.
The singer-songwriter explained he’d been gifted some Buc-ee’s swag the prior evening during the tour’s kick-off in Houston, including a tote bag with some chips inside, concluding with the immortal observation: “Buc-ee’s is a psychedelic experience.”
From there, things only got stranger and more wonderful. The band performed “The Surfer” live for the first time ever (“Oh, that’s a live debut,” Koenig remarked upon its conclusion. “That’s a global debut — an Irving debut. The whole DFW debut.”), and another phenomenal run of songs goosed the venue with palpable energy — “Campus,” which spilled directly into the eternal “Oxford Comma,” the viciously kinetic “Gen-X Cops,” “Diane Young” and the inescapable “A-Punk,” which set the capacity crowd bouncing like hyper-caffeinated children.
After acknowledging the sold-out Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory (“I believe this is the first time we sold out,” Koenig said, “which is very exciting for us”), and dryly asking the audience to “make some noise for the Toyota Tundra ... Tacoma ... Ford F-150 ... Chevy Silverado,” he requested an indulgence.
“I don’t know what to call this,” Koenig began, by way of introduction. “A song, an experience — just stick with us.”
Thus began what he called “Cocaine Cowboys,” one of the most freewheeling and plainly strange experiences I’ve had in concert, possibly ever. For more than 15 minutes, Vampire Weekend deftly mashed up its own material (“Married in a Gold Rush”) with works by the Gatlin Brothers, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Phish and the Grateful Dead.
The gargantuan, go-for-broke medley would have been enough to illustrate how Vampire Weekend is less concerned with its fastidious, prep-school past than pushing itself into strange new territory even before Koenig invited a fan up on stage to try her hand at playing cornhole — the enormous board ringed with lights, adorned with a prospector and the words “Gold Rush” near the top — and awarding her $300 cash for her trouble. “Pleasure doing business with you!” Koenig chirped as she exited.
The entire thing felt like a collective hallucination — taken together with the interpretative dance, the unexplained strangeness of the subterranean-styled staging and the bracing juxtaposition of elegant, erudite indie rock songs against goofy flourishes, giving over and letting go was the only reasonable course of action.
“This has been a hell of a show, I must say,” Koenig said near the main set’s apex. “It’s very special to be starting [the tour] here in Texas.” It was an earnest sentiment, and one that only deepened the sense of playfulness so pervasive elsewhere — not to mention the encore’s extended blitz of covers: Talking Heads, the White Stripes, Phoenix, Kings of Leon, Beyonce and Billy Joel all made appearances.
Vampire Weekend is a band that could easily tour on the strength of its back catalog; time has not dimmed the effervescence of its early work.
The group could also lean into its prep-school persona from the early days — not for nothing does it sell a $95 rugby shirt adorned with tour dates at its merch stand — but the vibe these days better aligns with a different piece of merch on offer: the $5 slap bracelet, an absurd but fitting analog for the simple pleasures Ezra Koenig and his bandmates offer.
The depth is there if you care to take it in, and the skill with which it’s presented has only grown sharper. But if you’re Vampire Weekend, it’s a lot more fun — and sustainable — to surrender yourself to your most left-field impulses and embrace whatever happens next.
