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.
The thing about the way I troll for fodder for this column – going to [monolithic internet retailer]‘s web site, clicking on new music releases for a given week, seeing what catches my eye – is that I have no way of knowing whether the album covers that I write about are in fact new, or are just reissues of older albums. This is exacerbated by the fact that I’m looking for artists I’ve never heard of and don’t permit myself to do any research on them before I write about their album covers. So the odds that I will end up exposing my ignorance by writing about an established, classic artist that I’ve just never heard of are fairly high.
This month I crank those odds up a bit more by picking album covers with designs that are either inspired by classic designs of the past or, maybe actually are classic designs of the past. Once I finish writing this I’ll go and figure out what’s what, but for now we’ll just feast our eyes on some timeless (or perhaps just anachronistic) album covers.
One of the most compelling cover images ever?
It may be well into the glorious, green, sunny season of spring – at least for those of you not stuck in the interminably cloudy, cold weather sinkhole that is Seattle these days – but that doesn’t mean everyone’s releasing bright, cheery indie-pop records about bunnies and dancing and dancing bunnies and dancing with bunnies. There are still many musicians out there crafting dark, disturbing works and putting them out whenever they damn well feel like it. If you do pick up any of these albums, you’ll probably want to wait until nightfall to put them on the old hi-fi.
Levi Fuller on axe-wielding album cover stars
On the in-house design “services” offered by a prominent CD manufacturer
Levi Fuller finds a few rare examples of design worthy of praise
BY LEVI FULLER: Questionable design choices to hook them while they’re young
LEVI FULLER takes on the grim slate of holiday music releases
BY LEVI FULLER: A look at musicians who make album covers that demand to be taken seriously. And fail.
BY LEVI FULLER: In honor of the ghoulish season, some frightening album covers (for various reasons)
RECORDS BY THEIR COVERS BY LEVI FULLER: Taking on the album art for new releases by Natasha Borzilova, Taylor Eigsti, Sully Erna, Nona Hendryx, Jane Monheit, Mel Tillis and Rhonda Vincent
BY LEVI FULLER: Taking a wary look at the art for new albums by Dondria, Doro, Lissie, Nils and Wason
RECORDS BY THEIR COVERS BY LEVI FULLER: Setting ‘em up and knocking ‘em down
RECORDS BY THEIR COVERS BY LEVI FULLER: Accentuating the positive with new albums by The Like, Punch Brothers, and Gurrumul
BY LEVI FULLER: Tenth Avenue North, Jennifer Knapp and Kaskade demonstrate why Photoshop is not your friend
RECORDS BY THEIR COVERS BY LEVI FULLER: Taking on the cover art for new releases by Jason Castro, Straight No Chaser, and Christian Scott
RECORDS BY THEIR COVERS BY LEVI FULLER: Taking on Demon Hunter, Daniel O’Donnell and Gary Allan
A COLUMN BY LEVI FULLER: “this cover is saying ‘I am arty’ out of one side of its mouth, and ‘I shop at Wal-Mart’ out of the other…”
A COLUMN BY LEVI FULLER: Reviewing two new releases by Ke$ha and Phil Vassar using nothing but their covers
Paul M Davis