it’s this, for me. it’s inseperable from the rambling but always gorgeously melodic sound of the album.
the best listening experiences for me are always sort of synaesthetic, in the sense I associate the music with colours and physical textures, and emotions knotted in those things.
the music sounds and feels like scraped knees, scuffed trainers, dusty ridged fields, domestic scrub, broken fences, patches of stray woodland fringing suburbia…
it feels like free-spirited but gentle liminal misadventure; I imagine the kids on the front are stealing strawberries (maybe they are?), and I feel the blue rope netting, the deep summer green, forgotten scratches in long warm days wayward from parents.
the tapestry of guitars and softly propulsive patter of drums, that’s where they take me.
umm… yeah.
what do you like?
please write a bit about your choice and don’t just spam loads of covers. x
Obvious choice but this. The expression is so enigmatic, you could ask 100 people to think of one feeling you think she is experiencing and every answer could be different
Album art as a visual representation of the music within. Looks exactly like the album sounds for me, warm, gauzy and noisy. Also my favourite album. So many LPs now in drone or shoegaze follow the fuzzy washes of colour format, you can almost predict what they’re going to sound like from the art.
Which then makes the following album more than just a great standalone explosion of colour but a real artistic statement by way of contrast to its predecessor
Wu-Tang had a lo-fi aesthetic from the get go, but I love how ODB revelled in in here. Lots of rap album covers by groups I was into at the time tended to go with straight portraiture and were fairly serious. This managed to do a bit of both of those things, but also be funny and clever.
It is the colour and the sound of 1969; the end of the summer of love, as the world takes a darker turn into the 70s so too does Scott Walker as his music becomes ever more experimental and melancholy, and this album cover encapsulates the last moment as even Scott himself fades into the iris.
I love the cover of Blur’s self-titled album. I mean, it’s literally a Blur. But it’s such a huge departure from the observational Englishness of the four that came before (Great Escape maybe less obviously English, but still feels in a similar vein as the others - literally the escape from the dog track once you’ve made your riches). You don’t even need to hear it to know they’d sound very different. And then the person on the cover is pushing a hospital gurney, like old Blur is dead/dying and this is the resuscitation they desperately needed.
Probably reading too much into it and overthinking it. But I think it really matches the music inside. And then the desolate back cover really fits the mood too.
I love Strange Geometry by The Clientele too. All their album covers are pretty good I think, but this one feels like it fits especially. It particularly pairs really well with Losing Haringey. Just that sense of warm summer evenings, feeling a bit melancholy, hearing life going on through the walls, walking with no purpose, just reflecting on stuff. Happy and sad at the same time.
I always try to take photos like this painting on the way home from the pub, but I’m a shit photographer, especially when I’ve had a couple of pints.
Okkervil River have a bunch of great art but I think this one wins for me- baroque, melancholy and a bit sinister. Just perfectly captures it.
Shout out to Sunbather by Deafheaven too- that cover perfectly captures the music (apparently it’s meant to be the colour of looking at the sun through closed eyes)
