Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Everybody Is Covering Everybody



It seems as if the hip trend at the moment is cover songs. In fact, the other day Shawn and I were joking around that our favorite songs of the year so far were all Animal Collective covers. In truth, we were only half joking. One really good cover of a Animal Collective song comes from Norwegian artist Sondre Lerche who covered "Bluish" which you can check out here.

Cover songs are so popular that even Peter Gabriel is getting in on the act. Not that this is exactly new territory for Peter Gabriel. He did a fairly memorable cover of Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" a few years back. Which was pretty fitting actually considering Vampire Weekend drops his name a couple of times in the song. Gabriel must have had such a good time covering Vampire Weekend that we can expect to see a whole album of covers to be released on February 15th. Other indie artists that Peter Gabriel will be covering include Arcade Fire, The Magnetic Fields, and Bon Iver.

You can listen to Peter Gabriel cover Bon Iver's "Flume" over at Stereogum here. Personally, I'm not a big fan of his take on the song. Part of what makes Justin Vernon's songs so great is his heart-breaking falsetto. Fortunately, Gabriel's cover of "My Body Is A Cage" by Arcade Fire isn't bad.

Speaking of Justin Vernon, he teamed up with Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, at a concert recently where they performed some covers of Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" and Dolly Parton's "Jolene." You can take a listen to both over at Pitchfork.

Another cover that St. Vincent recently did that managed to make its way on the internet is her version of The National's "Mistaken For Strangers." I absolutely love her take on this song. I'm really hoping she'll be performing this one when she plays the Rhythm Room on February 11th. Take a listen up above and drop a comment with what you think.