[ATTENDED: May 31, 2025] Vampire Weekend
Vampire Weekend’s first two albums are perfect. They are two of my favorite albums and any time I listen to them, it makes me smile. I had wanted to see them for a while, but I wasn’t sure if they would be as good as the records live. And then suddenly they were selling out bigger venues than I wanted go. I had tickets to see them in 2019 but couldn’t make it. Somehow I missed when they played The Mann in 2024 (I was too buys that weekend anyhow) and finally I was able to snag tickets for one of the two nights at The Met.
I saw after that they played a different set for each night, so it’s a bummer I couldn’t go to both. But having finally gotten so see them I can yell at my younger self because they were fantastic live.
After Geese left the stage, a giant Vampire Weekend banner dropped in front of the dark curtain. A whole bunch of folks in dayglo yellow set up the stage area–bringing out a piano and drums as well as a mic stand.
Having never seen them I honestly wasn’t sure if this was the show–just a trio in front of the band’s name. And I was fine with it because they sounded great.
It was just the original trio singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig, drummer Chris Tomson, and bassist Chris Baio. They opened with the quiet Hold Me Now and then segued into a far more rollicking Oxford Comma (And I was in heaven because they’d already played on of my favorites songs). And then they played Blake’s Got a New Face, which my wife and I had just been singing. It was great.
It was sometime during the next song Ice Cream Piano that I realized that there were more sounds coming from the stage than these three guys could possible make. And soon after, the pulled back the VW curtain to reveal a huge band behind them. The revelation was quite a delightful surprise and it wasn’t until they started the next song, Classical (which I never no the name of) that I realized how great the whole huge band sounded. There were two drummers, keys, several guitars and lots of backing singers. During the instrumental section of the song, one of the guys in the dayglo shirt did a very sexy dance in the spotlight. It was pretty fun.
And how to describe the backdrop? It looked like they were in an underground tunnel, like a concrete bunker with multiple ins and outs. It looked really convincing.
Ezra typically played guitar but for a few songs, like Connect, he put down the guitar and walked the stage while singing. (more…)
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My wife and I saw Geese open for Vampire Weekend back in May. It was about a month before they really blew up. They had a couple of singles that I’d heard and I loved Cowboy Nudes. Soon after this show they released Getting Killed and became the most popular band in America.
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