Vampire Weekend — Kemba Live!, Columbus, OH
Vampire Weekend, on a breezy and bright night at Kemba Live! in Columbus, curated a cultural dialogue—a kind of prep-school gospel under the Midwestern stars, where irony and earnestness held hands and danced.
Parents standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their Gen Z kids, a picnic of pre-teens and grad students, dads in boat shoes nodding along to polyrhythms, and all ages in between filled Kemba Live! in Columbus. But that’s Vampire Weekend’s quiet superpower—this improbable communion. In a world prone to segmentation, they offered synthesis.
The band opened with “Campus,” a fitting throwback that set the tone: collegiate, self-aware, and still tender after all these years. From there, the setlist unfolded like an honors thesis in melodic anthropology. Classics like “Holiday,” “Cousins,” and “Diane Young” crashed joyfully against the shimmering architecture of new tracks like “Gen-X Cops,” “Mary Boone,” and the hypnotic “Ice Cream Piano.” The sequencing felt intentional—like a Socratic dialogue between their Ivy League roots and their ever-expanding sonic vocabulary.
“Capricorn” and “Hope” brought meditation through weight and breath. “Harmony Hall,” perhaps the band’s most crystalline hymn to contradiction, turned the lawn into a luminous, philosophical singalong: “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die.” Few lyrics cut through the twilight with such elegant ambiguity.
The encore, “Walcott,” was a crowd-pleaser and a benediction. Ezra Koenig and company seemingly suggested that perhaps we’re all trying to leave Cape Cod—or some internal version of it—and that rock and roll, when it’s this smart and this generous, might be one of the few valid exit strategies.
Kemba Live! became a well-lit seminar room under White Skies, where the syllabus was joy, rhythm, and the strange poetry of growing up.
The next 3 stops in Vampire Weekend’s Only God Was Above Us tour are:
• Jun 3, 2025 at Stage AE Pittsburgh, PA
• Jun 4, 2025 at Broadview Stage at SPAC, Saratoga Springs, NY
• Jun 6, 2025 at Firefly Distillery, Charleston, SC
VAMPIRE WEEKEND
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Harry Acosta is a professional photographer who started out shooting concerts. He is an avid concertgoer and loves to capture his favorite musicians and unseen moments we take for granted in everyday life.
