One of Vampire Weekend’s Best: “Unbearably White”

Vampire Weekend’s long-awaited album, Father of the Bride (FOTB) finally came out this past May. It has grown to contain so many of my favorite songs of theirs. This album was a masterpiece and truly showcased the talents of every individual involved. With an 18-song album, they were able to have some wiggle room to showcase a more diverse spread of work. It was a bigger canvas without sacrificing any of the work itself. There were now slots for songs that could exist for those that really wanted to dive in deeper. To note, Vampire Weekend was my favorite band of all time, my love for them was difficult to express with words. I usually tried to view music and musicians from an unbiased point of view, but I was admittedly too far gone at this point. So, this was much more of a love-letter to them than anything else.

Songs like “Harmony Hall” and “This Life” have garnered much attention for their upbeat melodies, and “Sympathy” has even appeared in an Apple Watch commercial.  These songs had more of a wide and easy appeal. I wasn’t docking those songs either— I loved each of them dearly. These songs won me over instantly, without a doubt in my heart. However, one song on the album has perplexed me and piqued my curiosity from the very first time I heard it: “Unbearably White”. I liked it upon my first listen, but it took multiple rounds for it to be a contender as one of my favorites off of the album. 

The song “Unbearably White”, track number seven, has an eyebrow raising title, but its instinctual racial implications weren’t what this song was about. It was about a relationship, and a failing one at that— a catastrophically destined one. One of the things I loved about Vampire Weekend was their use of character study in their songs. In many of their previous albums we’ve been given distinct names: Hannah, Blake, Diane, Bryn etc. There have also been many nameless, yet detailed, characters and protagonists, the ‘Diplomat’s Son’ in the song from the same name was the most pointed example of this. 

In “Unbearably White”, we didn’t get many, if any, specifics about our characters at hand. We didn’t know their names, gender identities, economic backgrounds, nothing. We didn’t need to. Instead, lead singer and main lyricist for Vampire Weekend, Ezra Koenig, provided us with more concrete visuals about the setting. We get a solid grasp of where these people were. They were in the mountains, on an edge, a dead-end of sorts. The listener was able to exist with them in that time and place, regardless of who these people actually were. Locations had always been a trademark for the band’s songs. Name-dropping places like Alameda to Dharamshala. The fact that we didn’t know what mountain they were on provided even more mystery to the song, especially in the context of the Vampire Weekend canon. 

The line of fiction/non-fiction with Vampire Weekend’s discography wasn’t the interesting one, and we weren’t ever going to fully know. Koenig didn’t always like to give away everything going on under the surface. Maybe this was a song based off of a real relationship, but maybe not. With a lot of Vampire Weekend’s music, none of it screamed that any of it was intensely biographical. However, there was a moment on FOTB that changed this when Koenig directly referenced his partner, Rashida Jones’ sister, Kidada, by name in the song “Stranger”. This was just an interesting contrast to “Unbearably White”, which felt deeply like a short story right out of an anthology. 

First off, musically this song was on another level. There were so many interesting and odd choices made. Every time I listened to it, another unearthed itself and made me fall in love all over again. Rhythmically this song was also really fascinating with its use of choppy bongos. They added some nice texture that allowed you to be able to groove to this song just little bit.  There were also elements that sounded like a Theremin (it apparently wasn’t, but Koenig wouldn’t give away what it was exactly. He stated this on his radio show Time Crisis when asked by his co-host American painter, Jake Longstreth.) There were also some dissonant synths waning in the background. The mixture of instruments on this track didn’t place the story into a specific time period either. This could have happened in the early 80s before Ezra was even born, it could have happened yesterday, or it could take place in an unlived year.

Also, the smooth, slinky guitar from the beginning also situated “Unbearably White” into a different camp from their other songs. Tension was then created from the strings that came in later. They made the song to feel cinematic, as if we were watching a fight of them bubbling up in their apartment kitchen. It added to the stress of the relationship and the scene. Strings weren’t something that was new for Vampire Weekend, but on FOTB especially they were sparse. It felt like a nice nod to their previous work as well as their old bandmate, Rostam Batmanglij, who left the band prior to this album to focus on producing and solo work. One of his main producing signatures was the use of strings, which could be seen throughout Vampire Weekend’s first three albums.

The initial setting and the repetition of the word ‘unbearably’ was what immediately made me want to listen over and over again. It was a strange word to hear in a song once, let alone twelve times. The fact that the scene was on a mountain top and the unbearable whiteness was meant to describe the starkness and barren nature of the relationship. It was horrifically dead, yet there was still this hesitancy to call things off completely. There was unfortunately still some love there, a few flowers impossibly growing in the most unlikely environment. Both the snow on the mountain peak as well as the page of the notebook were both referred to as “unbearably white”, due to how untouched they were, unbothered. They were like that only moments before the avalanche came pouring down, before things got even more complicated.

The song was incredibly catchy and had some tongue-in-cheek moments like the use of the word ‘buff’. Without being a regular listener to Time Crisis, one might not be fully aware of the use of this word in the particular manner Koenig intended. He was not using it to talk about someone’s physique, instead it has become a synonym for something unfortunate in his personal vernacular. “Baby, I love you / But that’s not enough / And pulling away has been unbearably buff.” This phrase and its strange usage were what drew me towards making my own shirt centered around it. I wore it to their performance in Detroit at Mo Pop Festival this past summer. Koenig liked my picture of it on Twitter, giving his approval. For those outside of the hardcore fanbase of Vampire Weekend, in the FOTB era, fans have become accustomed, and welcomed by the band, to make their own bootleg merchandise with references to both their songs as well as the radio show, Time Crisis.

On my initial listen to this song the almost Hitchcockian moment at 50 seconds made me jump— but in the best, most unexpected way possible. Why did they include that? It was so strange and theatrical. It was almost like something out of a horror movie. It was what played when a person with a mask was revealed to be standing around a corner. Maybe that was what one of the parties of this relationship discovered. The other person wasn’t who they thought they were. This instrumental spike also only happened once in the song, but it was absolutely perfect. More than that would’ve been overdone. Every time I heard it, it made me smile.

The layered, spacey vocals over the bridge were wicked. They almost felt like a narrator peering down in this story. Almost in the way that The Muses from Disney’s version of Hercules sang about the lives and events of the main characters, but they weren’t a direct part of the story themselves, just letting the audience in on secrets. The voices felt omniscient: “Call it a day / Call it a night / Careless and cold / And just unbearably white”. They sounded poetic but separate from the action. They acted as almost a warning to our protagonists, but who knew if our characters actually listened.

One of the reasons I loved Vampire Weekend so much was because they had these tableaus with all of these Easter eggs waiting to be found. The hunt was there for those who wanted it, but if not, it didn’t take anything away from the music. Their songs were layered like rock formations. References from history to literature, to pop culture all sidled up against one another within songs with timestamps rarely over five minutes. They never got boring because of all of the time and craftsmanship that went into every beat. Their work had a Twinkie-level-shelf-life due to this. The six years that us fans waited for FOTB was worth it for treasures like this one. 

I was lucky enough to see them three times this year and hear “Unbearably White” twice. Getting to hear the excitement from fellow fans when the song began was pure euphoria. I couldn’t wait to hear what other stories this band will give us the opportunity to peer into and what characters we shall meet in the future.