It’s not easy to like Vampire Weekend. I carry enough vaporous remainders of my bygone college radio posturing against bands that didn’t conform to my peer group’s preference for vagabond scruff, all battered sneakers, faulty gear, and romanticized disenfranchisement. From the jump, the aesthetic of Vampire Weekend has basically been what would result if Old Navy and Urban Outfitters had a baby and it was a rock band. I’ve labored to put aside most of my instinctual musical judgments, but that’s a tough impression to push past.

Father of the Bride, Vampire Weekend’s fourth full-length, is officially the first outing for the band following the departure of Rostam Batmanglij, though his fingerprints still appear here and there. That puts the creative throttle firmly in the hands of the band’s frontman Ezra Koenig, who exudes the very polo-shirted aura that I can find so chafing. But he also has an undeniable way with melody, creating music that’s light, buoyant, and sneakily experimental. A track such as this album’s restless, raucous “Sympathy” zips all over the place, while remaining within reach of the established Vampire Weekend sound, like a wildly driven model airplane tied to stake firmly driven into the soil. Koenig surely knows that challenging himself also means challenging the average Vampire Weekend listener. To his credit, he seems okay with that.

Koenig has acknowledged listening to Kacey Musgraves’s albums had a strong influence on his songwriting for this album, and Danielle Haim was seemingly recruited to be a stand-in for the country star. The three songs that are duets — “Hold You Now,” “Married in a Gold Rush,” and “We Belong Together” — are the strongest on the album, the grasped-at country stylings provided welcome weight to the waft of Vampire Weekend’s approach. Haim’s vocals sound like Sam Phillips doing her best Emmylou Harris impression, and there’s a warm magic there.

Much of the rest of the record is recognizable Vampire Weekend with ripples of small innovation that become clearer with repeated listens. “Harmony Hall” is dappled with nineteen-seventies soft rock ease with the burnished armor of modern indie pop, and “Bambina” has a slight, enticing Marshall Crenshaw vibe. Sticking with comparisons from roughly the same era, album closer “Jerusalem, New York, Berlin” is like a misplaced Jackson Browne ballad and it works surprisingly well. With eighteen tracks, the band’s distinctive style starts to wear. There’s only so much airy production, plunking melodies, and keening vocals any listener should be asked to bear in a single sitting. At times, it seems like music deliberately designed to generously allow minds to drift. That’s nice, I suppose, but it’s like the musical equivalent of a bath bomb. That doesn’t strike me as particularly exciting.

Even as my compulsion to dismiss Father of the Bride (or at least hearty portions of it) wells up, I must also concede that Vampire Weekend has an uncanny ability to make music that insinuates itself over time, steadily impressing in increments. I certainly fell for the band’s previous album, Modern Vampires of the City. At this stage, I’m not sure if I’m actually hard to get or I’m just playing. Either way, Father of the Bride still has a reasonably chance of toppling my defenses.