Pip Brown, the New Zealand-born multi-instrumentalist better known as Ladyhawke, has overcome a fair bit of misfortune in her young life. At the age of ten she was diagnosed with a disease called erysipeloid, which is common in seagulls but hadn’t been seen in humans in 20 years. If that’s not bad enough, she’s allergic to all forms of antibiotics and penicillin, which complicated her treatment so much that she ended up in a coma.

After coming close to death, she recovered only to discover in the coming years that she had Asberger’s syndrome, a form of autism that makes social interaction difficult. So how did a sickly, socially awkward New Zealand teen go onto become on of the most exciting musical artists we have today? Well a formidable talent, drive and sense of adventure have come in handy.

Brown was only a teenager in New Zealand when she formed the band Two Lane Blacktop with some friends. They went on to play at legendary New York club CBCG. Then on an impulse, Brown moved to Melbourne where she formed the band Teenager with Nick Littlemore (Empire of the Sun).

But it was her decision to leave Teenager and focus on her solo project, Ladyhawke, that shot her to prominence. Ladyhawke is named after the 1985 cult film, in which a radiant Michelle Pfeiffer played the cursed title character.

Bird references seem fitting, given that Brown was nearly killed by a seagull’s disease and that her whole life since represents a phoenix-like resurrection. She says the name represents the way she sees herself – as “a pop superwoman creating radio-friendly songs with a single bound”. Either which way, it’s a killer name.

Rightly or wrongly, Ladyhawke’s 1980’s influenced dance music has seen her grouped with other contemporary singers such as La Roux, Little Gaga, Sia and Little Boots. All have distinctive looks, visual style and more than a taste of androgyny.

Which brings us to Ladyhawke’s cover art. The illustrated watercolour and ink drawings that feature on her records and in her music videos have helped define her brand.  They’re by 31-year old Melbourne artist Sarah Larnach, who is not only Brown’s collaborator but also her best friend.

Larnach first saw Brown at a Melbourne party in 2004, where she immediately noticed her “mopey posture, unlike anything I’d seen on a girl.” Speaking to The Independent in an article about their friendship, Larnach recalled: “She seemed really cool and I immediately wanted her to be my friend, but I didn’t want to freak her out, so I didn’t even talk to her.”

They lived close together and soon became friends. “I had a large of group of friends, but never a best friend, so it was great meeting Sarah,” says Brown. “Straight off the bat I found her hilarious. Sense of humour is key for me – if I find someone completely unwitty, I can’t even bluff getting along with them. She is sharp and intelligent and I enjoy every second of conversations with her.”

Larnach was a slack student at art school and lacked confidence in her work. Brown observes: “She is the biggest procrastinator in the world, but I always thought she was an incredible artist – she has a brilliant imagination. When she first plucked up the courage to show me some of her art I was so impressed. I ended up posing for her for heaps of paintings, so I became a bit like a muse, though I wouldn’t quite call myself that.”

It’s a fair description however, as the collaboration between the two has created a career for Larnach. “As soon as I met Pip I knew she was going to be really significant, not just in my life, but in general, and I knew I’d do anything to help her. Maybe I’ve helped her a bit, but she has helped me a great deal.”

If popular culture has taught us anything, it’s that we should never trust suburban bliss. Whether it’s in classic films like American Beauty and Blue Velvet or small screen hits like Desperate Housewives, manicured lawns and picket fences are invariably a front for dysfunctions, neurosis and murder.

And so it is with the Grammy Award-winning artwork for Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the 2008 collaboration between Brian Eno and David Byrne. While it initially resembles a screen shot from The Sims, upon closer inspection the picture gets much darker.

The packaging was designed by Stefan Sagmeister design house Sagmeister Inc,. “I loved the music right away” recalls Sagmeister “it was new; it was different from anything they had done before.” After a few listens, the designers noted the contrast between the “exuberant” music and the “dark edge” of the lyrics.

The inspiration for the cover was Home, one of the record’s key tracks, where Byrne sings:

Home – such a funny feeling
Home – no one ever speaking
Home – with our bodies touching
Home – and the cameras watching

While the track sounds sunny and uplifting, it’s clear that “not everything is all hunky dory”, as Sagmeister puts it. So after creating the pixilated perfection on the record’s cover, the designers then fill the booklet with “clues that allow the viewer to put his or her own story together”.

We make out a shady figure clutching binoculars in one of the windows. Band-aids sit on the back porch, while a condom wrapper can be spotted in the roof’s gutter. And that’s before we discover the ominously armoured door, which presumably leads down to a cellar.

But why the pixilated aesthetic? The answer may lie in the music. Brian Eno describes the collaboration as combining “something very human and fallible and personal, with something very electronic and mathematical sometimes.” He says that he and Byrne tried to “make that picture of the human still trying to survive in an increasingly complicated digital world.”

The incredible deluxe packaging comes in a tin (described by Sagmeister as a “jewel box”) that models the suburban environment in 3D.  Upon opening, a microchip plays the sound of footsteps walking down a corridor and slamming a creaky door. The experience is so rich that by the time you reach the great record by Eno and Byrne, it simply feels like a welcome bonus.

We may not be able to trust suburban bliss, but with designers like Sagmeister around, perhaps we can still rely on the simple pleasures of kick-ass cover art – even in our increasingly digital world.

This article originally appeared in Monster Children Magazine

Things have been pretty quiet around here, we know. But we’re back baby and if you’ve missed your fix of fresh sleeves, the good news is we’re on the job.

“Females”, says British artist Jenny Saville, “are used to being looked at.” As one of the most successful painters of the last two decades, Saville has kept her gaze firmly on the female form.

She made her name with large-scale paintings of almost grotesquely fleshy women. The obsession started during her studies at the University of Cincinnati, where she encountered: “Lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts.”

The Manic Street Preachers are long-time fans of Saville’s work, having used her painting Strategy on the cover of their third album, 1994’s The Holy Bible.

At that time Richey Edwards was still the band’s lyricist, while Saville was one of the bright stars of the “Young British Artist” movement. Edwards disappeared mysteriously in 1995 and was only declared “presumed deceased” in November 2008.

Journal for Plague Lovers, Manic Street Preachers’ ninth album, is comprised entirely of lyrics that he left behind. Explaining the tribute on their official website, the band said that all “13 songs on the new record feature lyrics left to us by Richey. The brilliance and intelligence of the lyrics dictated that we had to finally use them.”

The band also felt compelled to use Saville’s 2005 painting Stare for the cover. Frontman Jame Dean Bradfield told BBC “We just thought it was a beautiful painting. We were all in total agreement. We just saw a much more modern version of Lucian Freud-esque brushstrokes.”

Inspired by a newspaper cutting, the painting depicts an androgynous girl with a large birthmark on her face. But when presented with the image on a CD cover, Britain’s main supermarket chains saw something else entirely. Thinking that the image depicted a young buy with a bloodied face, they deemed the cover “inappropriate” and refused to carry the album unless it was shipped in a plain slipcover.

Nicola Williamson, Sainsbury’s music buyer, said: “We felt that some customers might consider this particular album cover to be inappropriate if it were prominently displayed on the shelf.”

Having unwittingly contributed a new entry into the pantheon of banned album covers, Bradfield described the situation as “utterly bizarre”. “You can have lovely shiny buttocks and guns everywhere in the supermarket on covers of magazines and CDs, but you show a piece of art and people just freak out,” he said.

“A large female body has a power, it occupies a physical space, yet there’s an anxiety about it.” Saville once said of her art, “It has to be hidden.” Many are distressed that the same seems to be the case for a disfigured tomboy.

Journal for Plague Lovers may have been the most controversial cover of 2009, having accidentally sparked a dialogue about art, the body and censorship. You’d like to think that Richey Edwards, known for his highly political songwriting, is smiling somewhere.

This article was first featured in Monster Children Magazine

Agnes Montgomery is a Philadelphia-based artist that works in collage. Her work has been been getting heaps of attention since she was tapped by Animal Collective member Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox) to create the cover art for his highly-acclaimed solo release Person Pitch (2007).

“Noah is a good friend of mine”, Montgomery told us, “I showed him my collages back in 2003 and he liked them a lot.”

It’s easy to see what appealed to him. Montgomery creates her collages on a miniscule scale, using small scissors, found paper and a magnifying lamp. She then enlarges them and prints them on large canvases. The result is a striking and warm juxtaposition of images that is at once nostalgic and contemporary. Children make regular appearances, reinforcing the feeling of whimsy and innocent wonder.

Lennox recognised its potential as cover art: “Noah asked me if I’d like to make some collages for his next solo record and we talked and thought about it for a long time before it really started to happen.” While there may have been a lengthy germinating process, Lennox prefers to work very quickly. In contrast to Montgomery’s process, he likes to “spit it out real fast”.

“I get impatient writing songs, I can’t spend more than a couple of hours before I get frustrated” he is quoted as saying. “My favorite songs are the ones where I worked really really fast on, when it comes all out in like two hours or something.”

You would expect the end result to be shallow or sloppy, however the output belies Lennox’s professed impatience. His songs, as chief-supporter Pitchfork describe them, “consist of intricately constructed, heavily layered and highly repetitive loops on top of which Lennox sings oddly familiar and touching melodies.”

The music “sounds like what it is: one guy alone in his bedroom trolling though music history, picking and choosing bits to make something deeply personal and all his own”.

The parallels with Montgomery’s process was not lost on Lennox. “He liked the idea of collage cut paper for the album art since he was also working in a style of collage musically, cutting up samples” she says.

“The songs of Person Pitch inspired the collages. I listened to the songs over and over again during the course of a year to fully immerse myself into them and to try my best to make a visual match.”

“We corresponded mostly by email since he was living abroad in Portugal at the time. Noah didn’t give too much input as to what he was hoping for. He gave me a lot of freedom and space to just see what could happen. He already had a pretty good sense of my style and he thought it could work well with the songs.”

“Noah sent me one song at a time and I made a collage to match its song so they could be released as singles first.”

For the Person Pitch cover, Montgomery worked with both Lennox and designer Rob Carmicheal. “Visually the packaging being symmetrical was important to Noah. He had the idea of the layout and how he wanted the thank you’s and inspiration to be centered with 2 collages on either side of the flip fold out insert.”

“The album is kind of symmetrical in terms of how long the songs are, and I wanted the album art to reflect that” says Lennox. “I knew I wanted to do a lot of personal thank yous and I knew I wanted to have the artwork from all the singles on there in a symmetrical fashion. So I needed another text panel, and I also thought that since I was sampling so many different people I thought it was appropriate to give thanks to other musicians.”

This eclectic and much-discussed list of musicians included Cat Stevens, Daft Punk, Black Dice, Pink Floyd, The Beach Boys, Vashti Bunyan, Ariel Pink, Aphex Twins, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Jay-Z, Talk Talk, Kylie Minogue, Ennio Morricone, Metallica, Wu-Tang Clan, Nina Simone, The Strokes, Dr Dre, Notorious B.I.G., Nirvana, Echo & the Bunnymen, Enya, George Michael, Gratefull Dead, Maria Callas, Phil Collins and New Order. Whew!

On the cover of Person Pitch, a children’s pool party has been crashed by the inhabitants of a petting zoo. The result is squishy, psychedelic and oddly comforting, much like the music within. You could argue that these disparate party goers are an analogy for the album’s varied influences. Whatever the meaning, it’s a memorable image that acts as the perfect visual foil for Panda Bear’s beautiful music.

Bob Hund (“Bob Dog” in Swedish) are a Scandinavian indie band that were formed in 1991. Along the way, they’ve gathered a loyal following, picked up some Swedish Grammys and spawned an English-language side project called Bergman Rock. They’ve also commissioned some pretty cool cover art, which is notable for the fact that it comes from the one designer. Martin Kann has worked with the band for over 15 years and his output has been extremely varied.

It’s a fruitful relationship, so we thought we’d get in touch with the talented Swede to find out a little more.

Bob Hund: CD cover (1993)

Bob Hund: CD cover (1994)

How did you start working with the band?

Thomas Öberg (the singer), Jonas Jonasson (the keyboard player) and I know each other since way back. When the band was formed, Öberg called me and asked if I could design their logo – which lead to doing their covers, back drops, merchandise and all that.

Your relationship has been very long-term. Why do you think that is?

Apart from being longtime friends, I spend a lot of time time with the band on a social level. It gives me so many insights, which are a unique source for the design. Throughout the years the band and I have grown together so closely that neither of us can get rid of each other.

Instant Life (1994)

Bob Hund: CD cover (1994)

Bob Hund: LP cover (1996)

The covers you create for them are very varied. How do you approach each one? What kind of brief do they give you?

I usually get into the process when the band is in the studio and a working title is set. My approach is always idea driven, which means that the idea dictates the design. That way my design is often content based. I never decorate and I never consider if something is beautiful or ugly. Those are subjective words irrelevant to the idea.

Regarding a brief there never is one.

Bergman Rock: I’m a crab (1998)

Bob Hund: My Soul Is For Sale! Everything Must Go! (1998)

Bob Hund: Bob Hund Never Sleeps (1999)

How involved are the band in in the process?

Bob Hund and Bergman Rock are a very unique client when it comes to involvement. They more or less give me total freedom to decide what I want. One time they didn’t want to see the cover until it was printed.

Bob Hund: Let the stone age begin (2001)

Bob Hund: 10 Years Backwards and 100 Years Forward (2002)

Bob Hund: CD cover (2002)

Bob Hund: LP cover (2002)

Bob Hund: The New That Was Supposed To Be So Good (2002)

Bergman Rock: Jim (2004)

What is your favourite cover you’ve done for them?

Hard to say.

I put a lot of emotions into all my covers when I’m in the process, so they are all special to me. But if I’m forced to pick one it would probably be “Fantastiskt” from 2009.

It is a vinyl 12″ single made in an edition of 1. The record is glued to a real turntable acting as package with the lyrics etched on the lid. It sold on e-Bay for 3,650 USD and became the most expensive record ever sold in Sweden.

There’s so much mystery about this cover that perhaps it’s better to start with what we do know. The image was taken by London-based Jake Walters, a commercial photographer with an impressive portfolio across fashion, celebrity and editorial portraiture.

The adorable baby, with its cheeky little expression so at odds with Morrissey’s stern gaze, is the son of Charlie Brown, Morrissey’s assistant tour manager.

Design practice No Allegiances is responsible for the design and packaging. Having noticed the subtle Mexican sounds in the music, they took their cue from Mexican folk art and vintage California. The typography was inspired by the work of legendary illustrator and printmaker José Guadalupe Posada.

The packaging also features a still life, Bodegon Con Jarra de Vino (1914), by A. Fuentes.

Noting the chiaroscuro of both the cover photography and painting, No Allegiances ran the LP and special CD version on fabric-textured stock to “makes the record feel like an oil painting hanging in the Louvre that you shouldn’t have just touched.”

But what does it all mean? The arresting image on the cover of Morrissey’s ninth studio album caused an instant deluge of speculation when it was first surfaced late last year.

Widely reported as celibate, the image of an awkwardly paternal Morrissey seemed unlikely. It also followed two other popular covers where the indie icon held a gun and a violin.

The consensus opinion seemed to be that the title referred to his years of refusing sex and that the baby on the cover symbolically represented an absence born of this choice.

Complicating matters further are the symbols – one of which appears on the baby’s forehead and the other on his arm. When the image first appeared online the file size was too small to fully make these out. Was that a W on the baby’s forehead? Did it represent the outgoing president of the Unites States?

Um, no – the baby has a butterfly on his forehead, while Morrissey’s arm seems to feature a caterpillar. For me, this awkward symbolism is the cover’s one misstep and adds little to what appears to be an instantly iconic image.

If it’s meaning is opaque, it’s no accident. This is after all this is Morrissey – a cultural figure that has always defied easy categorisation. An artist that has referred to himself as being “a fourth sex”; that famously campaign for animal rights and vegetarianism. A man who has flirted with the nationalistic far right and in the nineties developed what Encyclopedia Brittanica described as “a growing homoerotic obsession with criminals, skinheads, and boxers”.

Anticipating speculation about his latest cover, he had already drafted a response on the sleeve notes to The Years of Refusal:

“If you ask why the new album has the title it has (‘Years of Refusal’) and why on the cover he is holding the baby, after holding on previous covers the violin and the gun, because after all people will want to know, or more rumours will spill into the world and its voracious, agitated internet shadow, the sigh will almost crack into real annoyance. If you sail close to the gale force wind and bring up the sticky situations he finds himself in when he talks of his mythical old England, its disappearance and/or cultural and commercial conversion, and heretically flirts with the flag, and faces expulsion from the entertainment scene, then the sigh and the awkwardness will know no bounds.”

A paranormally gifted woman stands in front of a barren, twisted and wintry landscape, her face expressionless and intentions unclear. The mysterious cover of Fever Ray’s self-titled debut album invokes a pitch-black, pagan sensibility.

For its designer Martin Ander, the job came at a perfect time. “I had just started to draw by hand again after years of computer dependence when Karin asked me to do the album art for her solo project Fever Ray” he explains. “That was just what I needed to get me started with ink and paper again.”

Fever Ray is the alter-ego of Swedish musician Karen Dreijer Andersson, who is better known as half of brother-sister duo The Knife. When she briefed designer Ander on the cover art, she “gave me a mind map containing old photographs of seanses, haunted houses and people covered with ectoplasm” he recalls, with the instruction that “this is the emotion I want to project”.

Drawing holds a special significance for Ander, the son of the famous Swedish illustrator and political cartoonist Jan-Erik Ander. “I kind of grew up with it”, he says.

But while his father carries on the tradition of political satire, Ander took his approach and inspiration from a more contemporary genre.

“I want people to try to understand and look for clues. That’s something I got from being a longtime fan of skateboard art, where the graphic on the board plays a big part in building the myth behind the rider or company, or in this case Fever Ray.”

It’s an interesting observation on the parallels between cover art and skateboard art. And while the ghost of Charles Burns’ work can be made out in the high-contrast and macabre aesthetic, Anders names influences closer to home. “I’m a big fan of Swedish horror artist Hans Arnold, who is mostly famous for an ABBA album cover and his book illustrations.”

His original brief for Fever Ray included an album cover, some merchandise and two 12” singles, however this body of work has already expanded. “I wanted the images to link together, like a story. The motifs are mostly a result of coincidence, but there is a cohesion. All the images refer to each other, the lyrics, videos and Fever Rays private self. I like the idea that the cover is more than just an image.”

The approach is at the same time vivid and ambiguous, a tension that’s consistent with Fever Ray’s music. She builds creepy soundscapes that are the perfect haunted house for her modulated, androgynised vocals and oblique lyrics.

“I prefer lyrics that are like that”, she said in one interview, “I like to keep it as minimal as possible… It’s very important to keep the magic and the feeling of something you can draw yourself. You don’t want to be too literal.”

As representatives of the almost-supernatural wave of creative talent coming out of Sweden at the moment, Ander and Fever Ray remind us what dark arts both music and design can be.

Note: This article appeared first in Monster Children Magazine

From now on, every issue we’ll be contributing a new article for the “Behind The Cover” section. It’s an excellent publication, so be sure to pick a copy.

Yes, it’s a jpeg successfully masquerading as a gif.

Merriweather Post Pavilion is the 8th studio album by Animal Collective and is already being acclaimed as one of the best albums of the year.

The much-anticipated and now celebrated album boast trippy cover art inspired by the work of Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka.

Kitaoke started working on rats and then monkeys to earn his PHD in animal psychology, before moving on in the nineties to study “visual perception and visual illusions of geometrical shape, brightness, color, in motion illusions and other visual phenomena like Gestalt completion and perceptual transparency, based on a modern conception of Gestalt Psychology.”

As a result, he’s created heaps of incredible visual illusions.

Writing in Pop Dose, Taylor Long observes that the “optical illusion cover for Animal Collective’s latest and eighth release, Merriweather Post Pavilion, is more than something fun to look at while under the influence of the sort of drugs you might like to be on while listening to it. Curves of bright green ovals on a purple background, they appear to be in motion when we know they’re stationary. It’s an apt representation of the album’s dueling thematic components: fantasy versus reality, whimsy vs obligation, restlessness versus tranquility.”

Or as a fan succinctly puts it on the Something Awful forums: “I dunno, that album cover looks pretty much how Animal Collective sounds”.

For me it evokes other associations. Do you remember those awful magic eye pictures that ruled the world for a few months in the early 90’s? Basically they were just a messy, indistinguishable shape but if you looked at them in a certain way and concentrated, a 3D shape would pop out.

I was in primary school when they became popular and I had real trouble seeing the hidden image. Other people would take one glance and then be all like: “Oh yeah, it’s a plane.” Meanwhile I squinted, held them close to my eyes and then pulled them away slowly; tried crossing my eyes and uncrossing them. After a protracted period I might finally make out the hidden image but not before suffering derision for my evident lack of insight.

I imagine for many that it’s like this with indie music. A bunch of cool kids hear an unusual band and get busy loving them, while a clueless and somewhat frustrated majority try to make out what’s so special.

In 1997 designer Peter Saville received a call from Jarvis Cocker. “They needed to reposition Pulp” he recalls, “They wanted to present Pulp more as a rock band. The music was a lot deeper, darker and moodier and they called it This Is Hardcore.”

The result was one of the most controversial album covers of the nineties.

This was probably assured the moment they invited American painter John Currin to direct it. Currin is known for his technically skillful paintings, which typically depict the intensely sexualized female form with heavily pornographic overtones. This meeting of high and low art has found a ready audience and Currin’s work routinely sells in the high six-figures.

The artist flew to the UK and worked closely with Saville to develop a concept for the shoot. In briefing the pair, Cocker explained that the title didn’t refer to pornography, but rather the “new, hard, resolute spirit of the band” says Saville, “Jarvis talked to us about fame and how it changes the world around you.” He was admirably blunt is admitting that the band “wanted to be taken more seriously.”

The eventual plan was to take photos of the band next to models. These models were carefully chosen for their “super-real characteristics”.

The final choice for the cover was shot on the last day in Saville’s apartment, after the original photos were deemed to be “not hardcore enough”. The woman is a Russian glamour model known only as Ksenia, who later told FHM: “The shoot was fun. Jarvis is very nice, very shy.”

While its an image that disturbed many, to dismiss the cover as empty provocation would be unfair. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams writes in New Statesman Magazine, pornography “is simply the most familiar visual language through which we appreciate the disparity between the intensity of imagined experienced and the disappointment or disgust of its realisation.”

The impact of the cover is heightened by it’s striking aesthetic, which manages to be at once grainy and high-gloss. Currin chose fashion photographer Horst Diekgerdes to take the images, before Saville used a Photoshop feature called Smart Blur to create a more painterly finish.

The final touch is the typography, with the album’s title stamped over the model in Helvetica Bold to resemble a message from the censorship board.

This is Hardcore might have flown under the radar as cover art but when the label released posters all over London they caused a scandal. Was the woman a sex doll? Had she just been raped? Was she dead? The strong opinion of many women was that she was certainly offensive.

Vandals took to the images, defacing them with statements that included “This Offends Women”, “This is Sexist” and “This is Demeaning”. Saville was unrepentant. “For the whole thing just to have passed without a murmur would have been a great disappointment.”

But is it even more disappointing if Pulp lost a potential audience that judged the book by its cover? This is Hardcore is in reality an at-times tender album with a mature detachment from misogynism. In the standout track ‘A Little Soul’, dedicated to Cocker’s absent father, a man begs his son not to repeat his mistakes:

“But everybody’s telling me
you look like me
But please don’t turn out like me.”

“Yeah, I wish I could be an example.
Wish I could say I stood up for you
and fought for what was right.
But I never did.
I just wore my trenchcoat and stayed out every single night.”

It’s an intensely sad portrait of a man that has made all the wrong, seedy choices and thrown away his opportunities for happiness. I imagine this now sentimental old geezer checking out at the cover of This is Hardcore, simultaneously fighting back both tears and an erection.

For more information on this cover, visit the excellent Pulp fan site Acrylic Afternoon.

“One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting.”
Gerhard Richter 1973

The same could probably be said of music.

When Sonic Youth went into a modest New York basement studio in 1988 they baulked at the $1,000 a day fee. Although they’d previously recorded four other albums, they had yet to achieve a national profile and only had limited means. To keep the budget under $30,000 the band worked through the night and rushed some of their takes.

Despite these limitations, it seems they had some inkling that down in their basement they were building a monument. Everything about the finished result announced a bold intent, from the double album format through to its suggestive title. And the cover became central to its iconic status. As Jutta Koether, a German artist and critic, wrote in the liner notes to the 1993 Reissue, “With the inclusion of “high-art” cover-art, it became visually and musically a description of loss and self-doubt.”

After 8 years of Reagan, the candle represents a lone spark of hope and optimism, one that is albeit vulnerable and lonely. Depending on whether you are a “half glass full” or “half glass empty” kind of person, it could either represent the undying hope that Obama evoked or the dwindling remainder of once-great aspirations.

The featured artwork is “Kerze” (candle), a painting by German artist Gerhard Richter.

Facing the complicated question of what to paint at the beginning of his career, Richter instead decided to amass thousands of images taken from photos and clippings. He would pick one, project it onto the canvas and then recreate it in a photo-realistic manner. The distinctive touch that brought him a worldwide following is the “Blur” – the smudging he applies that disrupts the image.

He also went on to create a body of abstract work.

He’s an amazing artist. But by the late 80’s he was also an artist of the establishment, so the band’s decision to use his image was as unexpected as it was inspired. The inside-fold of the sleeve features a portrait of Sonic Youth circa 1988 and they don’t exactly look like they’re on the best galleries’ opening night invite lists yet.

The gap between the value of the Richter’s painting and the income of the “Daydream Nation” was only underscored when “Kerze” went under the hammer at 2008 Sotheby’s auction. Sonic Youth fans watched on gob-smacked as members of Europe’s high society rapidly drove the price up with every bid. It eventually went for over 7 million pounds.

But who needs the painting anyway? For less than $50 you can score a Daydream Nation poster for your wall and the soundtrack to go with it. You’ll find it still sounds pretty relevant.

From the hard to make out lyrics (“They called the clip a two-headed cow / Your hate clipped and distant, your luck, pilgrimage,”) through to the murky, unattractive cover art – nothing is made too easy on R.E.M.’s debut album.

R.E.M. were clearly not interested in perfection but rather the interesting tensions that came from ambiguity, originality and raw energy. The producer was to be Stephen Hague but the band successfully fought to have him fired after they found his obsession with technical perfection stifling.

When Murmur was released, it was praised by critics as an instant classic and reinforced Athens as one of the most exciting music scenes in the country. Only the fifth largest city in Georgia, Athens was a student town experiencing a creative explosion. As Josh Jackson writes in Paste Magazine, while “Athens wasn’t a one-horse town, neither was it Greenwich Village or San Francisco…But there’s something about a college town nestled in some small corner of rural America that ignites creativity in kids who grow up in towns like Macon, Ga., or Collinsville, Ill., and discover that there actually are others out there who share their passion for music, film or art.”

“Other college towns… would eventually get their moment. But in 1983, the spotlight was on Athens, thanks to R.E.M.’s full-length debut, Murmur.” Bands to have come out of Athens include the B-52’s, Indigo Girls, The Whigs and Drive-By Truckers.

Murmer’s cover art is a grainy tribute to the Southern landscape – one that is slowly being swallowed by kudzu, the agricultural nuisance you see on the cover. Imported from Japan, kudzu was originally considered exotic until it took on the qualities of an indestructible weed.

On the back cover of the record, we see a sepia-toned photo of a disused trestle, which was once part of the Georgia Railroad line into downtown Athens.

Before long, it was referred to as the “Murmur Trestle” by proud locals and, much like other landmark covers we discussed recently, became a point of pilgrimage for loyal fans.

In 2000 moves were made demolish it. But after a public outcry, which stressed not only the trestle’s importance in pop culture but also heritage value, the Athens-Clarke County Mayor and Commission voted to save the trestle in October 2000.

If R.E.M.’s portrait of its hometown is far from flattering, depicting a milieu riddled with overgrowth and crumbling infrastructure, it also originated the band’s policy of avoiding their own portraits on sleeves. As Pitchfork notes, the “group pointedly didn’t appear on its album covers or inner sleeves; instead, R.E.M. remained confident that a kudzu-covered ravine or a folk-art painting could speak more strongly about their music than their own presence ever could.”

Murmur was considered a commercial disappointment upon release and to date has only been certified gold (500,000 units). At the same time, it was named by Rolling Stone as the Best Album of 1983, pulling ahead of competition that included Thriller and U2’s War.

In 1996 R.E.M. re-signed with Warner Bros. for a reported $80 million in one of the biggest recording deals ever. In 2007 they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Starting out small and exotic worked for the band, whose eventual dominance proved as irresistible as the kudzu claiming their homeland.

The moment I saw this cover, my first question was whether that hair was real. When close inspection indicated that it was real, my next question was: where did they find this guy? The answer is that these are not models –  they’re the group.

The gentleman you see before you, with his proud man-mane, is Jarrod Zlatic. He and band mate Nisa Venerosa are the Fabulous Diamonds, a Melbourne-based group that create soundscapes with reverbed vocal and dub and organ and saxaphone and lots of other noises. 7 Songs (they’re all untitled) was recorded over 2 days in a warehouse and represents the best stuff to come out of their acclaimed live gigs in 2007.

They’ve developed a loyal and passionate following and have recently toured the States. While the music isn’t exactly my thing, I love this cover. On the weekend I was talking to a girl who’d just told an ex that he should get his back hair lasered off. She said that this was a selfless service for the future women in his life.

It made me reflect on man hair a little. During my teenage years I waited for some facial hair to appear and elevate me to a new level of mature sophistication. Instead I remained doggedly hairless as friends around me transformed into veritable chia pets. Even now in my twenties I can skip shaving for weeks and simply develop one of those patchy Asian-man beards that just look shifty on a white guy.

So I’ve been too immersed in my own hairless existence to really think about life on the opposite extreme; that of the man covered in thick curly fur. So far as I know, Venerosa and Zlatic are not a couple, however this cover speaks beautifully of those couples that won’t allow a man’s “sadness sweater” to come between them.

The lovely portrait was taken by Karl Scullin, of the much admired Kes Band.

In researching the plight of the hairy gentleman, I came across a hilarious and self-deprecating post by a young man name Jason, who argued that: “Hairy men take women that the mainstream would consider “unattractive” and make them wives and mothers.” He goes on to name “Harry Truman, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Barbara, Robin Williams and an abundance of other notable people” who have “all shared in this dirty secret.”

By coming out of the hairy closet, Zlatic has not only struck a blow for the unwaxed but also created the best Aussie album cover I’ve seen in ages.

Illinois was not only the most acclaimed album of 2005, it’s also the second installment in what may be one of the crazily ambitious musical projects ever hatched. Grandly title The Fifty States Project, it refers to Stevens intent to record an album about each of the US States. So far, he’s managed Illinois and the 2003’s Michigan.

To be fair, it’s widely assumed that the Fifty State Project is more than a little tongue-in-cheek, a good example of Stevens’ gift for self-promotion and media coverage. The cover for Illinois got a fair amount of press for all the wrong reasons, however, when its launch was delayed due to legal action from DC comics.

As rapturous reviews filled newspapers and sites across the country, fans became frustrated to learn that label Asthmatic Kitty Records had been forced to halt all retail sales. A détente was negotiated in a fairly swift fashion, with a balloon sticker employed to cover the copyright infringing superhero. Subsequent copies removed him all together.

A blogger named John, writing on beelerspace, best captured the sense of disappointment we inevitably experience when we discover just how little popular culture actually belongs to us. Writing as the news broke, he argued: “Including Superman on the cover of Illinoise was a mistake made in ignorance but also in innocence. Sufjan assumed that we owned Superman; that the man of steel was an icon that belonged to us. Sufjan’s Superman is the one of the classical heroism, the one driven by the public good, by honor and nobility, by that which is good…

“In DC’s legal universe, Superman is more like the one Frank Miller portrayed in the Dark Knight: a pawn controlled by an opportunistic, media-driven, shadow-government-cum-corporation. He’s not a hero, he’s a property…

“Sufjan’s intent – and that is the heart of what we’re talking about: intent – was to merely acknowledge the existence of Superman as an icon of America and Illinois.”

It’s a passionate case that he puts forward and one that is particularly refreshing in an age of cynical defeatism. The people at Asthmatic Kitty were a little less argumentative, merely conceding that they’d “forgotten” to check with DC. They were doubly unfortunate that DC were just wrapping up lucrative deals around the Superman Returns movie and that the album ended up becoming such a hot item so soon after release.

The cover art has also been blamed for inciting waves of mispronunciation, as the headline’s infectious call to arms has lead the album to be known as “Illinoise”.

But even without the controversy, the cover still stands as a very charming tribute to the state of Illinois. It’s a state that’s notable not only for its major city Chicago but also for being the “average state”. Widely considered a political bellwether, it is demographically diverse and culturally rich. Stevens’ cover pays tribute to icons that include the Chicago skyline, gangster Al Capone and the agricultural industry.

Superman has long been a proud part of Illinois’ history since DC decided to place the fictional Metropolis there. Life went on to imitate art, when a small town of less than 7,000 people changed its name to Metropolis and in June 9, 1972 the Illinois State Legislature passed Resolution 572 that declared Metropolis the “Hometown of Superman”. I strongly recommend a visit to the online Metropolis Chamber of Commerce.

In a subsequent release of outtakes from the album, The Avalanche, Stevens recasts himself as the superhero, pulling free of the strings that hold him up.

Should he ever release a commemorative edition of this contemporary classic, he may well choose to add an Illinois icon whose story is as impropable as you’ll find in any comic book. Obama’s unlikely to sue.

It’s always good to see the designers behind classic album covers getting critical and commercial recognition. And few designers could boast of a career as celebrated and prolific as Storm Thorgerson.

Taken By Storm: The Album Art of Storm Thorgerson was published by Vision On in 2007. It’s a selection of some of his best work from the past 30 years. The book also spawned a traveling exhibition of the same name.

Sleeve lovers in Brisbane can still catch Taken by Storm, which is showing at Artisan Gallery until August 1.

The same show toured to Sydney at the Global Gallery last December. For more information about this legend of cover art, there’s a nice article in the Courier Mail and an interesting interview that featured in in Time Out Sydney from late last year.

This is the second in our series of five seminal album covers by female artists

A lot of us have wanted to put Bono in his place from time to time. On the weekend I was reading a disturbing feature story on Bono, depicting him walking through Washington’s corridors of power, seemingly without the need for security clearance; every door on both sides of politics open to him. Fawning politicians lined up to tell the reporter that “you couldn’t say no to Bono”. Bono – who so happily mistakes record buyers for constituents and hates poverty as much as he does taxes – was depicted as half-saint, half-pop star.

So you would it would think it would have come as some honour when in 1997 Bono introduced Smith at a music magazine award ceremony as a “sister, lover, and mother”. Instead, accepting the award she said: “I’m not your mother, Bono. Do your own dirty work. Fuck you.” She later told NME that she found the statement “presumptuous”.

I recycle this minor controversy because this formidable attitude is embodied by the cover of Smith’s 1975 debut Horses. It’s an album that contains the unforgettable opening gambit: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” and forever cemented her reputation as the godmother of punk.

A keen proponent of independent theatre and performance poetry, she moved to New York in the late 60’s. Shortly afterwards she met art student Robert Mapplethorpe and by 1970 they were sharing the smallest room in the legendary Chelsea Hotel.

“We used to stay up all night,” Mapplethorpe said, “and she would do her thing and I would do my thing, and then we’d take a break and smoke a cigarette and look at each other’s work.”

Mapplethorpe ended up making his mark as a photographer and I remember studying the controversy his work caused in university. By the 80’s his main theme was interracial homoeroticism, which naturally baited the “moral majority” so empowered by Reagen’s ascendancy.

(Why this shot wasn’t used as the sleeve for the 80’s hit Ebony and Ivory I’ll never know.) His confronting work inspired a heated debate about government funding for the arts, of which Mapplethorpe was a recipient.

But before all the furor, in 1975, he had only just acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and started taking photographs of his friends and acquaintances. In the case of this image, the same sense challenge to gender norms is present. The man’s suit and defensive posture work at contrast with the confidence of Smith’s gaze and the delicacy of her hands to create something new. This isn’t the glam, make-up wearing, cross-dressing androgyny that Bowie had popularised.

Taken with only natural light, the cover emphasises a stark reality. The record company tried to touch the photo up and remove Smith’s hairy upper lip but she wasn’t having it.

There’s also an electric sense that this was the last moment of quiet before both Mapplethorpe and Smith lost their anonymity. They would both see plenty more hotel rooms in their high-profile lives, but never the shared poverty, intimacy and inspiration of the Chelsea Hotel.

Mapplethorpe died of AIDS complications in 1989 (various prayer circles probably high-fived) and in 1996 Smith wrote a book called The Coral Sea dedicated to her dear friend.

Today she still continues to record, write poetry and tour. As Bono very graciously responded after her outburst in 1997, “she never let’s you down.”