Well, this is a bummer.

With the impending demise of Is Greater Than, it seems that this will be my last column for this here web site, and the last installment ever of Records by Their Covers (assuming HuffPo doesn’t come calling). Keep your eye out for the coffee table book, though. It’s been fun dissecting album covers and displaying my musical ignorance for the world on a monthly basis, and being a part of the Is Greater Than family. I tip my hat to Paul Davis for his efforts, and I wish him all the best in future endeavors.

I didn’t really have a choice for the theme for this final piece. All I had to do was search [internet retailer]‘s music releases for “End,” sort by date, and voila! A delightful pile of crap, with a few sparkling diamonds embedded in it.

All Ends – All Ends

There’s a lot going on here. We have two delightfully begothed frontwomen, a couple guys in the back who seem to have a Black-Crowes-in-Hot-Topic sort of thing going on, and then there’s a guy wearing a bizarre hat standing behind the ladies who looks vaguely homeless, although he does have a nice shiny chain which seems to match the one the redhead on the right is wearing. There’s also some serious abuse of Photoshop going on here, what with the swoopy, blurry clouds taking the top of Red’s hair off, and the truly awful font choices. I’m going to give the band a little credit and assume this is another in-house job, but somehow I have no doubt that it accurately reflects the music inside. With an album cover like this, there is no way this band isn’t terrible.

I Am Many – To Every End There Is a Beginning

It’s a funny thing about album titles with the word “end” in them: you get a lot of cliches and tired tropes and rephrasings of the same general concept. So here we have the band I Am Many with their entry, To Every End There Is a Beginning. And while it’s easy to say “damn, that’s frickin’ profound, Einstein. What teabag did you read that on?” there’s a reason it’s a cliche: it’s true. Take our friend Paul here. He is, alas, ending Is Greater Than, but I’m sure as he closes up this shop he will be opening the door on another, exciting new chapter in his life — to torturously mix a metaphor or two and throw another cliche in the mix. So let’s not find fault with I Am Many (or any of these other bands) for their overly familiar album title. Instead, let’s praise them for their intriguing, minimalist album design. I’m going to guess based merely on the logo here that they are a band of the heavyish persuasion, but it’s clear they’re not by-the-number metal or anything like that. They’ve made it clear that they have arty, modernist inclinations. I’m certainly curious to hear what the band behind this cover sounds like.

The Living End – The Ending Is Just the Beginning Repeating

See, there we go again; another pseudo-philosphical rephrasing of this end = beginning concept, this time helpfully illustrated with an ouroboros, a spirally thing we’ve all seen a million times, and a classic optical illusion. This album cover isn’t terrible, but between the Ventures font, the clip-art graphics, and the tired title concept, I think I would go for I Am Many’s offering before checking this one out. If I were to hazard a guess as to what this band sounds like based purely on the art, I would say Tortoise playing surf-rock. Which now makes me want to listen to them more . . .

Peter Green – The End of the Game

This is either a reissue of some classic, forgotten (by me, at least) electronica from the ’70s or an absolutely brilliant new cover meant to evoke that era. Between the roaring cheetah (which, by the way, is exactly what I looked like when Paul told me he was folding the site) and the video game font it’s obvious this record totally rules, though. I’ll be checking it out as soon as I finish this piece.

Tasters – Reckless Till the End

I don’t even know what to say about this, but it’s so gag-inducingly awful I had to include it. First of all, for a second the band’s name reminded me of the classic third-wave ska band The Toasters, whom I saw many times in my high school rude boy days and totally loved. Tasters, I’ve never heard you, but I think it’s safe to say you’re no Toasters. Stop almost using their name. Next we have the album title, Reckless Till the End. With this spelling, and without an apostrophe, I am forced to read that second word as a verb – what farmers do to soil. The end result is somewhat abstract and poetic, and I’m sure not remotely what these geniuses meant. It was bad enough when The Who convinced everyone that ‘alright’ was a word, but this is just nonsense. I would talk about the art itself, but its terribleness sends my brain into a defensive shutdown as soon as I look at it. For a band called Tasters, they have displayed a remarkable lack of taste with this album cover. I can’t imagine what the music is like, but it has to be better than this cover, right?

All Shall Perish – This Is Where It Ends

Yes indeed, this is where it ends: kneeling in the town square in front of a church and a motel, blindfolded and bound, being whipped by a man in a tie while various religious leaders condemn you. I hope this isn’t what’s happening to our Dear Leader Mr. Davis right now. I’m pretty sure based on this art that this is a contemplative album of melancholy folk music. Isn’t that the vibe you’re getting? Also, note to the copy editors out there regarding title capitalization: Just because a word has two letters doesn’t mean it’s lower case.