Vampire Weekend delivers a terrific set of hits and humor at the Hollywood Bowl (2024)

Midway through Vampire Weekend‘s night at the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday, singer-guitarist Ezra Koenig paused to remind, or perhaps inform, fans in the packed amphitheater of the night’s special theme.

“Now some of you may be aware, and some of you may not be, but it’s ska night at the Hollywood Bowl,” Koenig said, noting that opening acts the English Beat and Voodoo Glow Skulls are bands that had influenced his band from the start.

“So there’s actually a bit of ska in Vampire Weekend,” he continued. “It’s one of the 17 secret ingredients in our proprietary Vampire Weekend recipe.”

All of this – said quite seriously, but also with a sense of humor – served to introduce the next song in the set, a ska-tified version of Vampire Weekend’s own “Ottoman,” renamed “Skattoman” for the night.

In many ways that spoke to what makes Vampire Weekend such a delight on stage. For as sincerely as Vampire Weekend takes its music on the albums, there’s often a silly sense of fun that surfaces on stage to make memories ever more endearing. (This is a band, after all, who at Coachella this year brought out both Paris Hilton and a guy dressed as Abraham Lincoln to play cornhole on stage with them.)

On Wednesday, the show opened intimately, with Koenig, bassist Chris Baio and drummer Chris Tomson, alone on stage, playing stripped-down versions of “Holiday,” “Cousins,” and “Boston (Ladies of Cambridge,” early songs from its 2008 self-titled debut and 2010 sophom*ore release “Contra.”

A black banner emblazoned with the band’s name added to the no-frills nature of the opening songs, and wasn’t hard to imagine seeing Vampire Weekend like this as it stepped off the Columbia University campus where it was born in 2006 and into its earliest live gigs.

The two Chrises slipped behind the curtain, leaving Koenig alone to start the next song, “Ice Cream Piano.” As its gentle opening verse and chorus ended, the curtain dropped, and the full band kicked, seven musicians in all, rocketing the song to a thrillingly clamorous finish.

“Ice Cream Piano” was the first of nine songs played off Vampire Weekend’s strong new album, “Only God Was Above Us,” its fifth studio release, which arrived in April. More perhaps than any of the records that preceded it, “Only God” is a rock record, a fact underscored by the power of its songs alongside the more delicate indie pop of the early albums.

“Classical” and “Connect,” which followed “Ice Cream Piano,” still present Koenig’s high, delicate vocals, but beneath them the sound was fuller, thanks in part to addition on this tour of four touring musicians: Keyboardist Will Canzoneri, percussionist Garrett Ray, and multi-instrumentalists Colin Killalea, and Ray Suen.

Highlights early in the set included such earlier songs as “White Sky” and “Cape Cod Kwasa Kwasa,” both of which featured the interlocking Afropop influences that signaled a freshness in Vampire Weekend’s sound as it broke out 15 or so years ago. In contrast, “This Life” and “Sunflower,” both from 2019’s “Father of the Bride,” showed off an equally intricate guitar style, but one that marked the band’s shift to a more modern rock feel.

After “Oxford Comma,” one of the most charming songs in Vampire Weekend’s catalog, Koenig brought out Ariel Rechtshaid, the band’s longtime producer, to “bring some nasty tones” on electric guitar, which he, in fact, did. “Capricorn” and “Gen X Police” rocked as hard as anything Vampire Weekend plays, powered by Rechtshaid’s big riffs while allowing room for lovely bits of piano and bass to stand out on the latter.

While many of the fans around seemed to know and sing all the words to every new song – remarkably so, in fact – older fan favorites such as “Diane Young,” “A-Punk,” and “Harmony Hall,” stood out even more as the main set wound down. “Hope,” which closes the new album also closed the main set, its beautiful melody playing on as first Koenig, and then the rest of the band departed the stage, one by one, until only Baio was left to play the final refrain on bass.

The silly fun returned in full force for the encore, which opened with “Dangerous Knife (The Night is a Knife),” which Koenig wrote and sang for comedian-actor Tim Robinson’s very funny, very strange Netflix series “I Think You Should Leave.” It sounds like a Vampire Weekend song, more or less, until you notice that it references such topics as “sloppy steaks,” a bit from the show we won’t attempt to explain here, and other oddities from the mind of Robinson, who came out at the end of it.

Another ska version of a Vampire Weekend song popped up next, with “Giving Up the Gun” transformed into “Giving Up the Skun.”

Five years ago at the Bowl, the band took requests shouted out by fans during its encore, focusing mostly on its own songs, but including a bit of Thin Lizzy’s “Boys Are Back in Town,” too. On Wednesday, Koenig announced that this tour they’re taking only cover requests that really challenge the band.

Which the band was when confronted with shouts for Steely Dan, the Grateful Dead, and the B-52s. That produced, in the same order, a decent first verse of “Peg” before Koenig ran out of lyrics he knew, a solid chorus of “Touch of Grey,” and a hilarious attempt at “Rock Lobster,” its improvised lyrics a string of nonsense barked out in the style of B-52s’ singer Fred Schneider until Koenig finally reached a line he actually knew.

Then, as the clock ticked down to the Bowl’s 11 p.m. curfew, “Walcott,” Vampire Weekend’s traditional closer, set the crowd to dancing and singing along, happy, laughing, satisfied.