Vampire Weekend don't reinvent the six songs they run through on this live-in-the-studio session, but they do some nifty interior decorating. Trumpets add a Victorian air to VW's Afro-tinged hits "A-Punk" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," and the band slows down the ska-tinged "Holiday," making it groove like a stoned Christmas party. On a loopy-yet-reverent cover of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm Going Down," Jersey native Ezra Koenig slips into the Bruce impression that lurks in every Garden State soul. But VW are more at home with "Have I the Right," by British Invasion one-hit wonders the Honeycombs, turning a fresh-faced stomp into a jazzy shamble. The affinity makes sense: The Honeycombs looked like actuaries and had one of rock's first girl drummers. They were a perfect rock & roll oddity, just like Vampire Weekend.

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“IRM”

Fashioned to mimic the sound of a magnetic resonance imaging or MRI, "IRM" (the French designation for the brain scan) grew out of Gainsbourg’s love of the sound of the clickety-clack of medical machinery. The IRM album project also marked the fulfillment of two goals for the singer: to document a traumatic experience, and to record an album with Beck. Though her co-creator and producer didn’t necessarily know the details of her water-skiing accident and resulting cerebral hemorrhage (which lead to the IRM of the song's title), he somehow knew how to handle the material. "Beck had a way of guessing what I was thinking and feeling without me telling him," said Gainsbourg. "We never discussed these things explicitly."