【搬运】【译】叉婊Pitchfork评Vampire Weekend 2019年专辑《Father of the Bride》

搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）

翻译：Simon Joanne

校正：Lynn Liu

排版：Lynn Liu

Vampire Weekend return with a shaggy, sprawling double album all about rebirth, contentment, and the reclamation of light.

Vampire Weekend带着一张如杂草藤蔓般蓬乱的双碟专辑回归，该专辑探讨了探讨重生、满足与光明的再生。

From the beginning, Vampire Weekend were winners: charming, relatively lighthearted; Columbia students one year, festival headliners the next. They had cute sweaters and smart jokes; they wrote with wit and curiosity about the tapestry of privileged life; they carried themselves with an almost infuriating sparkle. But they were also manic, weird, and provocatively cross-cultural, mixing up digital dancehall and string sections, Latin punk and raga in ways that didn’t quite fit. And despite their superficial politeness, there was something deeply antagonistic about them, the vestigial bite of suburban kids who grew up loving punk and hardcore but never quite felt entitled to its anger, the indie-rock band bent on breaking up the monopoly rock held over guitar-based music.

从一开始，Vampire Weekend就赢了：充满魅力、无忧无虑；做了一年的哥伦比亚学生后，成为了音乐节的头牌人物。他们穿着可爱的毛线衣、喜欢开巧妙的小玩笑；他们用智慧与好奇的笔触描写了特权生活的多姿多彩；他们还带着一股几乎让人不悦的光芒，但他们也很狂躁、怪异，煽动性地将不同的文化融合在一起——将电子舞厅音乐、弦乐、拉丁朋克和印度拉加乐以一种并不是很恰当的方式混合在一起。除他们肤浅的礼貌之外，其实他们内心深处仍具有某种对抗性——这些来自郊区的孩子，自小就喜爱朋克与硬核，他们身上的这种残留从没有能完全够资格转变为一种愤怒，这支独立摇滚乐队一心想要打破摇滚被以吉他为基础的音乐所垄断的局面。

In time, they grew bigger, denser, more serious. Their third and last album, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, felt almost haunted, every line crammed with allusion, every space stuffed with weird, processed sounds. Even the silences crackled with old life, a poster on a city street stripped away to reveal the fragment of poster underneath. It felt, appropriately, like the band’s then-home of New York, a place where you can’t take a walk around the block without feeling like you’re bothering the dead.

过了这么久，他们已经变得更加成熟、沉稳和严肃。他们发行于2013年的第三张（也是上一张）专辑《Modern Vampires of the City（城市中的现代吸血鬼）》，有种一直阴魂不散的感觉——每一句歌词都被塞满了影射，每一条音轨都被填满了奇怪的、被处理过的声效。甚至寂静中也洋溢着旧日的生活气息，一张贴在城市街头的海报——被撕掉的部分显出了下面一层的海报。正确来说，它感觉像是这支乐队之后的家乡——纽约，在这座城市中，哪怕是在街道边散步，你也必定会感觉你会打扰到了死去的一切。

Frontman Ezra Koenig relocated to Los Angeles, made an animated series for Netflix (“Neo Yokio”) and became a parent; Rostam Batmanglij—the band’s Swiss Army knife and in-house producer—worked with Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX, leaving Vampire Weekend in 2016 to work on solo music; the band has lived inside a pregnant pause. Now we have Father of the Bride—a looser, broader album than Modern Vampires, the great sigh after a long holding of breath. There are still moments of conflict, but in general, you get the sense the band is just relieved to have run the gauntlet of their existential doubts and come out relatively unscathed, grateful to be here. A glass of wine? Why not. Make it white, and if you’ve got it, a little ice.

乐队队长Ezra Koenig搬去了洛杉矶，为Netflix制作了一部动画剧集，还成了一位父亲；乐队中的“瑞士军刀”、内部制作人——Rostam Batmanglij，与Carly Rae Jepsen还有Charli XCX都进行了合作，这使得乐队在2016年只能制作一些单人音乐，乐队进入了一个停顿期。现在我们听到了《Father of the Bride（新娘之父）》——一张比《Modern Vampires of the City》要更为宽松、广泛的专辑，这算是憋了一口很长的气，最终得到了释放。冲突的瞬间依旧存在，但总的来说，你感觉到这支乐队已经放松到可以迎接他们疑惑的考验，并相对来说毫发无损地跳脱出来，同时依旧庆幸自己能够归来。来一杯葡萄酒吗？好呀，最好是白葡萄酒，如果可以的话，加点冰吧。

The music (produced again in part by Modern Vampires collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid, with a few cameos by Batmanglij) is accordingly sunny, celebratory, redolent at times of country, ABBA, lounge music (“My Mistake”) and Brazilian jazz (“Flower Moon”) and the barefoot exultations of Van Morrison (“This Life”). Just as indie bands like Pavement cautiously resuscitated the ’70s rock that came before them, Vampire Weekend have resuscitated—or recolonized, you could say—the multicultural boomer sounds of the ’90s, when bands like the Gipsy Kings and the Chieftains moved into the American market, when the Indigo Girls and Rusted Root helped constellate a folksy alternative to the punk-derived sound of “alternative music.”

专辑里的音乐（其中一部分同样是由乐队在《Modern Vampires of the City》时期的合作对象Ariel Rechtshaid制作的，Rostam Batmanglij做了一些修饰）由此显得更加芳香、阳光欢快、具有庆祝气氛，偶尔带有乡村音乐的韵味、宛如回到了ABBA组合、沙发音乐（《My Mistake》）和巴西爵士（《Flower Moon》）流行的那个年代。就像如Pavemen这样的另类乐队曾谨慎地复兴了70年代摇滚，Vampire Weekend复兴或者说改造了90年代地多元文化潮流中的声音，就像吉普赛王和酋长们都搬去了美国市场，特别是在蓝色少女合唱团和Rusted Root乐队帮助他们给“另类音乐”中由朋克衍生出来的音效中增加了一丝充满民谣气息的另类气质的时候。

In the past, the band tended to rely on unusual juxtapositions; here they present their sound more like a compilation, a set of cultural presets calibrated to induce nostalgia, revulsion, historical reconsideration. (Hey, you, remember Tevas? Peace Frogs? Papyrus?) The message is sincere, but the sound bristles with intellectual awareness, the protection you wear when wading into bad taste. “There’s always been that part of me [where] I see people beating up on something and I just wanna be like, ‘What’s really going on here?’” Koenig said on a recent episode of his online radio show, “Time Crisis.” For years, Vampire Weekend have implicitly threatened—in their perverse, contrarian, head-of-the-class way—to sound like Phish; Father marks the moment the threat becomes a promise.

在过去，乐队曾倾向于依赖反常的并列，但在这张专辑里他们将自己的音乐的展现更像是以一种合集的方式，像是一系列容易引起怀旧感、反感和历史审视的文化预设。（嘿，你还记得Tevas吗？Peace Frogs呢? Papyrus呢？）他们想要传达的主题极其真诚，但是音乐声让人毛发竖起，却具有一种充满智慧的意识，这些能在你淌涉坏品味音乐时为你提供保护。“There’s always been that part of me [where] I see people beating up on something and I just wanna be like, ‘What’s really going on here?’（我的某个部分总能看见人们为着一些东西自相残杀，但我其实只想说：“这到底是在干嘛？”）” Koenig说他最近的一集电台秀中说，“《化解危机（Time Crisis）》”有那么几年，Vampire Weekend曾以一种执拗、逆反的方式暗中逼迫自己要做出像Phish乐队那样的音乐，而《Father of the Bride》标志着这一逼迫已经成为了一种承诺。

For a band historically obsessed by the manmade world, its technology, its culture, and its flood of proper nouns, Father is relatively naturalistic, less reference-heavy and confined to its head. Several of the songs (“Hold You Now,” “Married in a Gold Rush,” “We Belong Together”) are literal duets between Koenig and Haim’s Danielle Haim—the sound not of one person thinking it through but two people hashing it out, of yin slowly reconciling itself to yang. Themes include spring, rebirth, a shedding of old skin, and reclamation of light; at one point, we return to the garden (“Sunflower”); at another, we hear the lullaby of crickets (“Big Blue”).

对于这样一个一直痴迷于人造世界及其科技、文化和泛滥成灾的专有名词的乐队来说，《Father of the Bride》相对来说要更亲近自然，少了一些沉重的参考和来自首端的限制。有那么几首歌（《Hold You Now》、《Married in a Gold Rush》和《We Belong Together》）完全就是Koenig与Haim’s Danielle Haim的二重唱，并非出自单人的思考，而是两人的讨论，就好像“阴”是自己慢慢与“阳”相调和一样。主题包括春天、重生、死皮的脱落和光芒的改造；在某一点上，我们回到了花园（《Sunflower》），在另一点上，我们听到了蟋蟀的摇篮曲（《Big Blue》）。

Of course, the garden—that fertile, innocent place we dwelled before civilization led us astray—is and has always been a fantasy, and home is never home again after one leaves. There are times when the universality of Father of the Bride feels forced, the sound of a restless mind repeatedly telling itself to relax, the paradoxical effort people make in the name of loosening up. Koenig said he wanted to try to write songs where a listener didn’t have to do too much legwork to figure out who might be singing them; to be clear, immediate, to conjure the myth of Ordinary People—you know, like country music.

当然，这座花园——在文明让我们迷失之前，我们所居住过的这片肥沃、天真的土地——一直以来都只是一个幻想，而且当一个人离开之后，家也不再是家了。《Father of the Bride》的普遍性有时候也是被逼迫出来，代表焦躁心绪的声响重复着安抚自己，这是人们以放松的名义所做的自相矛盾的努力。Koenig说他想尝试写一些听众不需要费力思考到底谁是演唱者的歌曲；创造出一种普通人的传说——就像乡村音乐。

But Vampire Weekend have never been that legible, nor is being legible any better than being a little obscure. More than anything, Father makes me think of something like Bob Dylan circa Self Portrait and New Morning: The sound of an artist trying to backpedal, in a fascinating, sometimes antagonistic way, on the gravity they had worked so hard to cultivate. “I think I take myself too serious,” guest guitarist Steve Lacy mutters at the beginning of “Sympathy.” “It’s not that serious.” Fair enough, but you can’t say a precedent wasn’t set. Nor could you deny that the song that follows—a violent, gothy piece of flamenco that features a club-jazz breakdown and ends in a hail of heavy-metal drums—is the most absurdly serious piece of music here, and incidentally, one of the best.

但Vampire Weekend从不会这样直白，直白也不会比存在一些晦涩之处要好。最主要的是，《Father of the Bride》总能让人想起Bob Dylan的《Self Portrait（自画像）》和《New Morning（新一天的早晨）》：一位艺术家尝试以一种迷人但有时显得颇具对抗性的方式在他们曾费心制造的重力之下改变立场。“I think I take myself too serious（我觉得我有时候太过严肃）”吉他手Steve Lacy在《Sympathy》的开头遍咕哝道，“事实上不需要这么严肃。”这说的很对，但也不能说就没有先例。你既不能否认接下来这首歌——一首暴力、哥特式，以俱乐部爵士乐崩溃为特征，以重金属鼓密集打击结尾的弗拉门科乐曲——是专辑中最荒谬般严肃但也因此是最好的一首歌。

Father is the first time they’ve sounded overlong, the first time they haven’t sounded almost incandescently vital, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped moving; if anything, with the exception of “Rich Man”—a lilting nursery rhyme that mixes a Celtic reel with a sample of the amazing Sierra Leonean palm-wine singer S.E. Rogie—the music here is as big of a step away from Modern Vampires as Modern Vampires was from Contra. In tow come the Grateful Dead-style guitar solos (“Harmony Hall”), the summer-camp singalongs (“We Belong Together”), the Beatles-y meditations on cosmic insignificance (“Big Blue”). Exhausted by big questions, they’ve consigned themselves to tiny reminders; once almost comically buttoned up, they have ventured, conditionally, to let it all hang out—a gesture as proportionally life-giving, indulgent, and periodically goofy as you’d expect.

这张《Father of the Bride》是他们专辑中第一张听起来有点过长的作品，也是第一张听起来没有让人感觉到十分重要的作品，但这也并不能说他们没有丝毫进步；如果真的有进步，除了《Rich Man》——一首混杂了凯尔特里尔舞曲和塞拉利昂的棕榈酒歌手S.E. Rogie作品采样的轻快的童谣——专辑中的音乐与《Modern Vampires of the City》里的音乐相去甚远，就如《Modern Vampires of the City》中的音乐与《Contra》（乐队上上张专辑）中的音乐一样相去甚远。然后也出现了Grateful Dead乐队式的吉他独奏（《Harmony Hall》），夏令营合唱会（《We Belong Together》），the Beatles式对宇宙意义的思考（《Big Blue》）。受到宏大问题的困扰，他们将自己委托给了更小的象征物；几乎一旦滑稽地扣上扣子，他们就有条件地冒险让它全部展现出来——这是一种与你所期望的生活给予、放纵和周期性愚蠢相称的姿态。

Generally speaking, happiness doesn’t make for great art; at the very least, it isn’t as combustible as misery, desire, or any other feeling rooted in what we lack rather than what we have. Listening to Father of the Bride, I hear songs of contentment sung by people who have tended to feel agitated, songs of belonging by people who have tended to feel as though they don’t belong. I miss the restlessness of Contra, the grandeur of Modern Vampires, the way the band used to sound anxious and self-examining about their privilege but now seem oblivious. Still, it takes a certain kind of bravery to feel the weight of lightness, to admit that things are okay. “I used to freeze on the dance floor, I watched the icebergs from the shore,” Koenig sings on “Stranger,” “But you got the heat on, kettle screaming/Don’t need to freeze anymore.” Corny, but that’s life sometimes. And with that, the wallflower peels away from the wall and starts to dance.

一般来说，幸福并不能创造出伟大的艺术；至少，幸福不像痛苦、或根植于我们所缺乏而不是我们所拥有的任何其他感觉那样容易燃烧。聆听《Father of the Bride》，我听到了不安之人唱出的充满满足之意的歌和没有归属感的人唱出的包含归属感的歌。我怀念《Contra》的躁动不安，《Modern Vampires of the City》的宏伟壮丽，这支乐队曾经发出的对他们特权的焦虑与自我审视之声，但现在看来已经很明显了。不过，要感受到轻盈之重量、承认一切事情都很顺利仍需一种特殊的勇气。“I used to freeze on the dance floor, I watched the icebergs from the shore（我曾经在舞池中动弹不得，我注视着海边的冰山），” Koenig在《Stranger》中唱道，“But you got the heat on, kettle screaming/Don’t need to freeze anymore（但是你必须恢复过来，烧水壶在尖鸣。没必要再站着不动了）。”这很老套，但有时候生活就是这样。于是，壁花从墙上脱落下来，开始跳起舞来。