Wednesday night, it turned out, was Ska Night at the Hollywood Bowl.
That’s how Ezra Koenig described Vampire Weekend’s latest visit to the iconic venue in the Cahuenga Pass, where he and his bandmates arrived this week not long into a world tour behind their fifth studio album, “Only God Was Above Us.” In truth, the LP has less to do with that venerable Jamaican style than any of Vampire Weekend’s other records; ska, at this point, is just “one of the 17 secret ingredients of our proprietary sound,” as Koenig put it onstage.
But it was in keeping with “Only God’s” deep thoughts on history — and with Vampire Weekend’s broader world-building instinct — to arrange this sold-out show around a strong concept with ties to the band’s beginnings. So a pair of long-running ska groups in the English Beat and Riverside’s Voodoo Glow Skulls as opening acts, as well as a handful of oldies that Vampire Weekend “ska-ified,” to use Koenig’s term, over the course of its two-hour set.
“Sunflower” was lean and ropy, “Ottoman” slightly manic in its propulsion, “Giving Up the Gun” was probably the band’s most convincing remake, alternating between bouncy verses and a breakneck double-time chorus that would have made Operation Ivy proud. Did 40-year-old Koenig introduce these tunes, in time-tested ska-revival fashion, with goofy alternate titles like “Skaflower” and, uh, “Skattoman”? Alas, he did. But you had to appreciate the thoroughness of his vision.
Indeed, this overhaul of familiar material showcased how skilled a live band Vampire Weekend has become over the last five years or so. When they emerged from New York’s Columbia University in the mid-2000s, Koenig and the group’s other members — bassist Chris Baio, drummer Chris Tomson and multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij (who’s since quit) — came across as charming but tentative studio rats whose blog-era fusion of indie rock, ska and African pop worked ingeniously on record yet lacked muscle and finesse onstage.
Chris Baio, right, performs on Wednesday.
(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
Now based in Los Angeles, Vampire Weekend in its seven-piece live incarnation (including a saxophonist and a second drummer) plays these days like a seasoned jam band: funky, dexterous, eager to follow a groove somewhere yet never roaming so far from Koenig’s well-sculpted melodies that anybody’s at risk of getting bored.
During the new album’s “Classical,” the group’s sax player, Colin Killalea, took a wild solo while a stagehand dressed in high-viz road-worker garb stripped off his orange vest and did a dance routine in the middle of the stage.
Like Vampire Weekend’s last few albums, “Only God Was Above Us” was recorded with painstaking precision by Koenig and producer Ariel Rechtshaid, who showed up Wednesday to join the band for “Capricorn” and “Gen-X Cops.” (Crucially, Rechtshaid started out in an L.A. ska band called the Hippos before going on to work with the likes of Madonna, Usher and Haim.) Its noisy cacophony evokes a feeling of chaos just barely held in place — a meditation from afar on the band’s hometown of New York, perhaps, or a riff on the messiness of parenthood in the wake of Koenig’s having a child with his romantic partner, actor Rashida Jones.
Yet “Only God” only really came alive at the Bowl, the song’s jabbing guitar licks and rippling piano lines cutting against each other beautifully beneath the still-boyish yearning in Koenig’s voice.
Chris Tomson on the drums.
(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
Beyond the new stuff and the ska-ified oldies, Vampire Weekend offered up a zippy “Cousins,” a dreamy “Hannah Hunt” and a vibey “Harmony Hall” with welcome echoes of classic acid house. For an encore, the band played a song Koenig wrote for Tim Robinson’s Netflix sketch-comedy show “I Think You Should Leave” — Robinson himself ran out onstage to give an awkward little wave — before taking requests from the audience: Steely Dan’s “Peg,” which Koenig cut short after confessing he needed Michael McDonald’s backing vocals, the Grateful Dead’s “Touch of Grey” and “Rock Lobster” by the B-52’s.
After that one, Koenig told the crowd he was hard up against the Bowl’s 11 p.m. curfew and had to move on to “Walcott,” which he called Vampire Weekend’s “traditional goodbye song.” But you got the sense that, for him, the fun of the requests — the fun of the challenge — had just begun.
