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.
There’s an old album cover with an image of a microphone wearing a tuxedo and bowler hat; there’s another with a blue-on-blue background and a lone piano under a yellow streetlight; another has a horseman riding across the neck of a violin. These covers, along with roughly 2,500 others, were designed by the same man; Alex Steinweiss.
From the late-1930s through the early ‘70s, Steinweiss designed album covers for record labels including Columbia, Decca, Remington, RCA, London and more. His portfolio is packed with vibrant, playful illustrations that were designed to catch the eye of potential record buyers. His job was to package classical, jazz, pop, country, soundtrack, vocal, orchestral and blues records in such a way that people would want to buy them. In doing so, he solidified album art’s place in pop art, established a much closer relationship between music and its packaging and became one of the most celebrated and recognizable designers of the 20th century. Steinweiss, who passed away on July 17, 2011 was a key player in transforming record packaging into an art of its own.
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.
This wooden box looks like my dad’s makeshift garage stepstool. Or my friend’s makeshift ferret bin. Due to the hole, one might assume it’s a makeshift stimulating aid from someone’s fetish closet. Regardless, it screams makeshift.
It’s actually a cajón, a lesser celebrated instrument in the contemporary world of percussion. When struck, this seemingly simple wooden box has all the pitches of a drum set’s snare, tom(s), and bass.
At first glance, it looks and sounds like something from Stomp, but it has a rich and interesting history. Rather than rip from Wikipedia, I’ll credit one of my dear friends D.G. who said the cajón was invented by African slaves who struck rhythms on fish crates during their time at sea. And so the cajón was born.
Levi Fuller on axe-wielding album cover stars
On the in-house design “services” offered by a prominent CD manufacturer
There’s been a slew of recent attempts glean insights from hip-hop’s history by exhaustively examining the genre’s lyrics. Yale University Press attempted to do so with The Anthology of Rap, to mixed reviews. Even though it focused on his own lyrics, Jay-Z’s Decoded served a similar purpose, arguably more effectively. Could a machine do better? Artist Tahir Hemphill thinks so, and is raising funds on Kickstarter to datamine the entire history hip-hop lyrics. Duncan Geere at Wired reports:
Our friend Cooper McBean of The Devil Makes Three has kept himself busy in the band’s downtime, putting together a backing band on the side for his solo efforts and recording a four-song ep available for download over at Bandcamp. Though many of his songs in The Devil Makes Three have a raggy, swingy lilt to them, the stuff on his side project Cooper McBean and the Vested Interests places its boot firmly in the honky-tonk camp.
Levi Fuller finds a few rare examples of design worthy of praise
A FINE LINE BY CAT JOHNSON: A look at Nudie Cohn’s legendary glittering Western suits
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)
MOONY HABITATIONS BY LEILANI CLARK: Sara Marcus’s Riot Grrl history conjures memories of the movement’s heyday
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
A FINE LINE BY CAT JOHNSON: A tribute to music’s most enduring symbol
Paul M Davis