Rock and Roll Music

I'll now also be using the blog to document the visual world around me. I'll be posting and commenting on the sort of things I like. I've started with album cover art.
  

Possibly my favourite album cover of all time. The artist typography is just gorgeous, so stylish. Album title typography is almost seductive. Both are cleverly pushed to the top of the cover and contrast wonderfully with the hypnotic blue of the background. And to finish a topless, shoeless, bell-bottomed Jane Birkin stares back at us with a doll clutched to her breasts. Mad, beautiful, brilliant.



Simple, self--deprecating idea. Like the bold, simple typography and colours.

 

Silly, fun image echoing Animals by Pink Floyd. Fun composition, liked the colours used.

 

Another simple, ironic cover with a combination of colours I like.

Fun image with a bit of a middle finger 'fuck you/u.f.off' to it.

Brilliant design that packages the music like a pill: perfect given the content.

A cover by Farrow that references the group this time - the Pet Shop Boys boringly playing up to their image. Staid look in muted colours. I also like the way the artist and album title are collapsed into a single understated sentence.    

Really like the use of typography and layout on this - must've been good as it almost made me buy the album. Reversed 'Rs' are almost unsettling. Central alignment almost reverential. Triptych cleverly echoes the religiosity of the title.

Love the retro, modernist feel of belle & sebastian's covers. Like the lower case artist v upper case title. Love the image drowning in colour - gives a flavour of the album, which sounds like the lost days of youth. 

Like the typography, image, composition, colours used. The placement of the umbrella keeps you looking: why an umbrella? Is it floating, inside out?

Love the photograph. I also like the way this photograph was split into two for parts 1 and 2 of their best of collection.



Just love this photograph. Title of this folk album is Unhalfbricking and the picture is of one of the band's parents (band can be glimpsed through the fence). Unusually touching for an album cover. 



As much a I liked the silliness of the jottings and the jumbled lettering the thing I always loved about this cover was the colour of the background: it actually made you want to pick the album up!  

Fantastic cover: bold, simple, uncompromising. Love the use of red and black on white. Like a boot in the face.  

Genius cover. Fantastic colours, an image that screams fun and hedonism - a child's flying sun with eyes like saucers!  

Like the artwork on this.

It's the idea of this that appeals to me. Simple, but it suits the innocent, retro-feel of the album. 

I love the colours in this photograph and the way the shelter has been placed in a band across the middle of the cover with the gold light illuminating the middle of it. Made the most mundane thing in the world look beautiful - in a perfect echo of the music.

I really like collage. I think this works well. I like the cleanness between the images and the strictness of the grid. I also like the way the dominant colours of red, black and sky blue bring the images together to make the composition work. This was very bold for them and reflected the break from their previous work.     

A beautiful image with typography that, for me, adds to the softness and fragility of the image - would like to have seen it in lower case, maybe? 

Love all these jazz covers but this is the best. Love the way the black key drops down, in turn pushing down the type, and the way the image occupies this one key. 

Daddy of the belle & sebastian albums.



I like the understated nature of this cover. The large areas of white space really make you focus on the artist/title and shapes of the bicycles.





It's a grim toilet yet I really admire the boldness. It's almost contemptuous - even the way the paper hangs and the way the photographer couldn't even be bothered to get more of the toilet in! Brilliant idea to have the details of the album scrawled onto the wall. And the tones reds and yellows are gorgeous.    

Love the typography for 'Rubber Soul'. Also love the colour used - works brilliantly with the mellow brown of the photograph. I think more than any other Beatles cover, this is the one that matches the music - a dope cover if ever I saw one.

Love the orange of the fields but the idea is what makes this. The shadow of the (Led) Zeppelin returns to eclipse the crop-circling nonsense of 90s Britain.