‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.
This spring, Vampire Weekend released their fifth album, Only God Was Above Us. Like all their albums, it was extremely well-received (“Universal acclaim,” says Metacritic), and they’re currently in the middle of a year-long tour supporting it. They take so long between albums that we wanted to strike while the iron was hot and celebrate some of the great covers of their work.
To state the obvious, five albums is not a huge discography. Last month we did The Kinks, and they’ve got 26 studio albums to cover songs from, and that’s not even counting all the non-album singles that include many of their biggest hits. But Vampire Weekend are beloved in a way few modern indie-rock bands are. So even though they don’t have that many songs, and even though they’re hardly in the game of making inescapable pop hits, they get covered a fair amount. And often in unexpected, inventive ways. Fitting for one of the most unexpected, inventive bands in the game.
Read on for our favorites.
When I was five, my brother and I were digging in the yard and we dug up some jelly beans. Being jelly beans, we ate them. As you would expect, as they weren’t really food and since they didn’t really decay, they were pretty much intact. And they were delicious. Our Mom apparently didn’t seem to think this was a very smart thing to do, so we were punished. But it seemed oh-so-worth-it in the end.
