We’re a little late with posting this one but Ty Lettau) has created a series of minimalist album covers. Why? No reason it’s just what designers do. The set has been pretty successful for Ty on Flickr. You might think Ty is an unemployed designer with nothing better to do? But he’s actually the designer manager at Adobe! So obviously he’s a designer that never sleeps!

What I think appeals about these series is the fact they become a puzzle. Without looking at the title you try and guess the cover. With album covers being some of the most iconic design of our time it’s not wonder designers are fascinated by them. No other piece of design lasts this long or is as instantly recognisable as an album cover. Movie posters come close but only few films can say they have iconic posters.

Below are all the covers Ty produced. I didn’t upload the Coldplay ones as they were basically the same as the originals.

View the post on the original The Black Crowes Amorica cover here.

View the post on the original Metallica The Black Album cover here.

View the post on the original Nirvana Nevermind cover here.

This set is very different from the previous set (the Modernist series) we posted back in 2009. There you can see the video game covers, movie poster and much more. Olly Moss has a lot to answer for as there is no shortage of these “minimal” or “retro” design series and they show no signs of slowing down.

Note: I’ll also post up the sushi and lego cover remakes after I collect all the images out there. Does anyone know any other “album cover remakes” I should cover?

Israeli-born illustrator Emek is one of the talents keeping poster art alive. Described by Henry Rollins as the “thinking man’s poster artist”, Emek continues many of the traditions of 1960′s psychedelia. His work is always hand drawn and heavily layered, mashing the political and personal; the organic and technical.

Yet despite his prolific collaborations with some of music’s biggest names, there’s one artist he was born to work with. “Working with Erykah,” he says “always brings out the best in me… I’ve worked with hundreds of bands, and I have to say that she is pretty unique. What kind of musician would fly an artist halfway across the country just to discuss the ideas of the album cover in person? And then cook them a wonderful vegan meal and play charades with her kids? Erykah, thats who.”

Emek first worked with Badu on 2008′s critically acclaimed New Amerykah Part One (4^th World War). Note: read the Sleevage post for that album here. On that cover, Emek focused on the “politics and social conditions in the world today, things that were weighing on her mind.” It was a dark but dynamic image, with Badu sporting knuckle dusters, her trademark afro entangled with the corrupted baubles of contemporary urban life.

When Emek listened to New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh), he discovered a new groove-based sound that was “more personal”. The resulting cover art retains the political symbolism – keen eyes will notice new references to foreclosed homes and the Tea Party  movement – but this time they’ve receded to the background. We get the feeling that a confident and all-conquering Badu has transcended them.

“You built a wall 20 feet tall / But if I get off my knees / I might recall I’m 20 feet tall”, she sings. Emek states that this lyric “was an inspiration to draw her to be a large face. She is 20 feet tall”. Her armour represents the way she is protected from the “harsh realities of life”, while the “color purple of the tree and the sky represent the 7th chakra”.

In many ways, both Badu and Emek are throwbacks. Badu made her name as a pioneer of neo-soul, and her early output triggered countless Billie Holiday comparisons. While never allowing her sound to stagnate, she’s consistently skated the fine line between batshit-crazy and inspired. Witness the video clip for her 2010 single Window Seat, which sees her stripping naked at the site where President Kennedy was assassinated, before pretending to be shot.

An artist as brave as Badu no doubt needs the armour Emek has painted her. Just as he needs musicians of her calibre to inspire his work. “Both Erykah and I were raised without a TV in our house, we grew up on record cover art”, he says. Let’s hope there are kids out there today being inspired by Badu and Emek.

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.”

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.

Is it just me or is all the innovative cover art being done for the least likely bands. Does being popular dictate that you must be safe? Beck would be the only mainstream artists who are doing anything innovative. Moldover, Menomena, ALB, Bright Eyes, Beck and Pine Bender all have innovative covers and yet they would be the bands you’d think would have little budget to do anything but a standard 4 colour jewel case.

Zinplaat’s 4th album Mooi Besoedeling is another innovative album cover. The cover and back are printed with scratch off ink. Like an instant scratchy. The cover appears to be a very simple design and yet hides a very different cover under the ink.

The designers at Fanakalo gave me this brief overview of the covers design.

Zinkplaat is an Afrikaans pop-rock-blues-fusion band from South Africa. The name Zinkplaat is the Afrikaans word for corrugated metal. This, their fourth album comes shrink-wrapped with a scratch-off ink layer on the front and back, as well as a guitar pick to scratch the ink off with. The album’s name ‘Mooi Besoedeling’ translates to ‘Beautiful Pollution’. Their brief was to create a universal artwork that didn’t form one central image, plastered on the front, which serves as a metaphor for the album title.

We responded by creating a colourful collage that represents the band’s various diverse influences coming together to create something new. The silver scratch-off ink resembles corrugated metal and we also designed the actual disc to have the unpressed silver form part of the design. We believe this is a very good functional solution to the fact that a simplistic clean cd cover design stands out most from all the clutter on a store shelf, yet is very boring once bought. We leave the concept open to interpretation, as it can be read as the silver layer being pollution or the fact that by scratching off the ink you ‘damage’ your packaging. However one wants to read the album as a concept, at least it’s very interactive seeing as people seem to love the scratch-off ink…

I have a copy of the album with me (I requested it ASAP after seeing the video below) but now I’m too precious to scratch it off. Luckily there’s already a good set of photos. I prefer the half scratched off look personally. The random montage of images works best when revealed through frantic scratching. I bet anyone seeing this half scratched cover on my desk at work could not resist having a scratch.

I’d love to get a poster made of this scratch off ink.

The back cover also got the same ink treatment.

I asked Rohan at Fanakalo if the printing was expensive, which for a small band not doing hundreds of thousand copies might be a major issue. Also was it was tough to convince the band to go forward with it?

The band signed off on it immediately because they briefed us wanting something ‘never done before’. We printed through an agent (hybrid media solutions) who outsourced the printing to Asia, so the cost wasn’t ridiculously expensive.

I guess it’s the band are willing to spend the extra money on the final product. When not looking solely at profit, you have the vision to think about the package as a whole (experience and the music) rather than just the $$$.

I also asked what the response has been in South Africa and record shops.

South Africa’s music industry is very small and monopolised (there’s only 2 big stores/franchises) – and the other thing is that Zinkplaat is an Afrikaans band, which makes it even harder for them to get shelf space because they compete directly with international albums. But after printing and selling the first batch the record store ordered an extra batch about 3 weeks after the album was launched, which is quite a feat in SA. Normally the record store doesn’t request music from local artists.

I asked about the language, as this is the first Afrikaans band I have been exposed to. Why not sign in English or is it like Rammstein?

In a country where we know Afrikaans and English we love having music that is only Afrikaans and only we can understand. Afrikaans is also a very beautiful language which is often much more descriptive and poetic than English.

Some bands from south africa worth checking out:
dear reader
aking
new holland
thieve
die heuwels fantasties

All credit to the band for putting the album together but you have to give credit to the designers for creating something which gives the band a point of difference.

I also like the inside band photo by Mark Reitz. I can’t help but think of The Hangover when I see this.

We were also sent some work in progress artwork for what the cover could have been. Rohan said;

the two montages was the direction we went first and realised it was too ‘picture’ – so we went more abstract and got to the final design. the montages sort of ended up being mood boards

And the designers also made a wine label (for the launch party and merch) and T-Shirt design from the cover.

Seeing the wine label gave me an idea, only to find that it had already been done with Wines That Rock. To make it worse the company only launched in October this year. Damn! I should ask for a freebie for pimping it here :)

You can check out more on Zinkplaat on their Facebook page or Myspace page.

It’s the interactivity of the cover that I like. Like all the covers I mentioned at the top of the post, they all give you something to do with the packaging once you hold it in your hands. It’s not just an elaborate packaging job whose sole purpose is to not fit in your CD holder (do people still have CD holders?) This is something you can’t experience just by looking at it. Even the best piece of typography can be experienced by looking at a jpeg however these need to be held, opened and played with.

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.”

There’s a difference between batshit crazy and eccentric. It’s a fine line but Badu manages to stay firmly on the right side of it. By every measure, 2008′s New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) should have been a total disaster.

There’s the unwieldy title, the status as a ‘concept album’, the big messy themes of urban violence, poverty and race relations. One couldn’t help but anticipate an incoherent throwback to a bygone era where hip hop actually took these issues on with honesty and passion.

The cover art certainly evokes that period, with its retro aesthetic. And it cleverly makes the most of Badu’s trademark afro to illustrate just how much the soul diva has on her mind. The Egyptian ankh, which represents life itself, sits at the centre. Around it we see a plethora of instantly recognisable symbols: pumped fists, satellite dishes, televisions, dollar signs and factories share space with malnourished babies, bees, flowers and peace signs.

The knuckle-dusters at the forefront spell out more than the album’s name – they represent her intentions. “To my folks on the picket line, don’t stop till you change they mind” is just an indicative sample of the fighting words found throughout.

It’s a really cool cover that manages to take on big issues in a striking and cohesive fashion. Much like the music itself, which defied perceptions to become a major critical and modest commercial success. New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) represents a career high for the talented musician and image maker.

At the same time the album hit stores, the video for debut single Honey was released. It sees her fittingly paying tribute to some of the greatest covers ever made. Check the full video out here

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.

But in the last few years I’ve been rediscovering the music of my teenage years and also how kickass the album covers were. It took me a while to whittle down my list to my favourite top 10. I’m sure I’ll come across a few later and wish I included them, but for now this is my definitive list in no particular order.

Warlock – Triumph & Agony
- Awesome painted cover: check.
- Chrome logo: check.
- Foxy blonde woman in leather being fondled by a demon: check.

Vinyl was king in the 80′s and hard core audiophile metal fans still prefer this format. The beauty of the large dimensions of vinyl covers is you can appreciate the detail and work put into painted artworks like this cover. This would look great on the side of a panel van.

Motorhead – The Bomber
This cover appeals to the plane spotter in me. Apparently there was a slight uproar that an English band would choose a German bomber, a Heinkel 111, over the English Lancaster bomber. Lead singer & bassists defended this decision: “Sure, it’s a filthy memory – but the fact is the bad guys make the best shit.” The scale of the band member to the aircraft is all wrong but I think it adds a comical air to the setting.

The Cult – Electric
The photo of the band is the only weak part of this cover and feels like a last minute add in. Sorry Ian Astbury, I’m sure that is your best raccoon hat.

But metal bands have the best logos, and creative use of typography and i think this cover is a great example of that. Metal band logo designs always seem to embody the nature of the group it is representing.

Def Leppard – Hysteria
This cover design is actually pretty cheesy and a good indicator of late 80′s graphix and that’s why i like it. The album is called ‘Hysteria’ so lets have a badly painted morphing of faces screaming. Overlay it on the plans to the Death Star from Star Wars IV and have a paint splattered album title, job done.

Judas Priest – British Steel
I’ve never understood the appeal of ‘The Priest’ but I’ve wanted to like them based on my fondness for some of their covers, which include Screaming for Vengeance & Turbo Lover. British Steel is my favourite.
This cover couldn’t be any more metal. A leather studded arm firmly gripping an oversized razor blade, all set on a “how more black could this be? and the answer is none – none more black” background. And their logo is just kick ass.

Kiss – Rock and Roll Over
I remember flicking through my friend’s extensive Kiss album collection for the first time and coming across this cover. It stood out in stark contrast to the direction of their other covers, and even other fellow metal groups cover designs at the time (1976). It feels like more of a designed cover then some artistic piece with it’s symmetry and very poppy japanese influence.

Poison – Open Up and Say.. ahh!
For me, this is the quintessential 80′s Hair Metal album cover. Day-glow colours, a Gene Simmons inspired tongue, big hair and a ridiculously unsubtle and misogynistic album title.

Aerosmith – Permanent Vacation

I love this for the great Sailor Jerry Tattoo inspired illustrations and the way they are placed in a repetitive wallpaper pattern. The red illustrations on black also balance really well with the yellow Aerosmith logo.

Iron Maiden – Somewhere in Time
It would be sacrilegious to not have a Maiden cover in this list. They’ve had some great covers but I guess this one stands out for me due to the fact it reminds me of Blade Runner. It came out around the time I started getting interested in metal, making this the first Maiden cover I came across. It also features one of my favourite incarnations of Eddie.

Van Halen – Fair Warning
This cover

I’ve loved Van Halen from the day I first listened to Van Halen 1. They’ve had a few interesting album covers after their first two releases, with Fair Warning being the standout for me. This cover is a little disturbing, which is fitting for what was hailed as Van Halen’s darkest album. But it wasn’t until I researched this cover that I discovered the complete painting “The Maze” created by the Canadian artist William Kurelek. The painting is a depiction of the artist’s  tortured youth and makes for a very bold and interesting choice for a so-called “hair band”. Then again, as fans of the band already know know, they were always so much more than that.

Now updated.

This striking cover from hip-hop maestro Jay-Z immediately caught our eye and we featured it yesterday. However our readers were quick to point out that we’d only scratched the surface in our review. So thanks to our learned, intrepid and (let’s face it) sexy readers, here’s an updated feature.

This month sees the release of The Blueprint 3 by Jay-Z . The legendary rapper is in top form, with the usual emphasis on slick production and collaborations with big names that include Kanye West, Timbaland, The Neptunes and Rihanna. In many ways, it’s business as usual for this consummate businessman – with the exception of the cover art.

It’s not a new thing to bemoan the paucity of quality hip-hop sleeves, which is what makes The Blueprint 3 so refreshing. Check out the behind the scenes video to appreciate the craft that has gone into making it.

Many have noted a passing resemblance to the muted cover of U2’s No Line on the Horizon.

While others point to Now Here is Nowhere by The Secret Machines.

Or Kingdom of Comfort by Christian rockers Delirious?.

But the album’s aesthetic and concept owes its biggest debt to the previous work of photographer Dan Tobin Smith. The assorted of junk is also reminiscent of his work for Athlete’s Tourist album.

Tobin Smith worked with art director Greg Burke and set designer Nicola Yeoman to create the mod, minimalist cover art for Jay-Z. With its gathered assortments of white instruments and electronic equipment, it makes me feel like I’ve stepped back into some avant-garde gallery in the 70’s.

And in a way, it turns out that’s the decade where Jay-Z wanted to take us.

Referring to the gathered instruments he says: “These things are like the forgotten pieces in hip-hop. It’s still about music. It’s not about radio, making gimmicks — it’s still about making music. Those things are piled in the corner. These are the forgotten things about music. It’s still about music. It’s not about radio, it’s not about making gimmicks, it’s about music.”

The three red stripes are also a symbolic call for a return to simpler times.

“The three stripes that everybody is asking about is made from the original [number] three. The first three they made on the wall was someone carving. If you look at [the number] 3, all they did was connect lines. The whole thing about this album, how I approached it, is that I wanted to make a new classic to start that all over again — to go back to making classic albums like the ones we grew up listening to.”

At this stage of his career, it’s a worthy goal to set out to make a classic. It’s also admirable that he would put so much thought and effort into a concept cover. After all, the sentiment that hip-hop needs to return to the ethos and integrity of a bygone era is nothing new – it’s just surprising to see it expressed in such a lateral and subtle way.

Update: there is a great interview with Dan Tobin on Itsnicethat.com who goes into great details about the cover and the process.

Here’s a quick excerpt.

This is one of the most anticipated albums of the year, and the first album Jay Z hasn’t appeared on the cover, how did you get involved in the project and what was the reasoning behind a much more sculptural approach?

Greg Burke, the creative director on the project at Atlantic records had seen the Letter ‘E’ I had shot with the set designer Nicola Yeoman and I guess he had it in the back of his mind when he was thinking of ideas for Jay Z’s new artwork for Blueprint 3. I think Greg and Jay Z had lots of ideas about what the album meant and it seemed to be about taking it back to the source, in terms of the music itself and then subsequently the artwork. For the album and the idea was it was very much about the music and all the things that make music. The 3 is represented by 3 bars which is of course the old way of writing ‘3’ so that seemed to work really nicely with the idea behind the album and the set design that evolved. We all liked the idea that the installation was almost machine like, like all these things were interlinked. That’s why everything is packed and jumbled together. Like it had kind of grown out of this corner.

I think it was a brave approach for Jay Z as all his previous albums have had him on them. I love still life, and the way I shoot is quite old school. It took 3 days to shoot, was all shot on 10×8 inch film, so the quality in the whites is fantastic, so much subtle tone. We worked long and hard on the colour work on the post and even in a single page mag advert I can see that effort. You could blow the image up to the size of a building and it would still hold up. It seems the album is about that old school crafted production so its nice that that same method went into the shoot.

Here is the letter E piece Dan refers to

I’ll leave it to the designers to argue over the merits of including the artist name, website and album title on the cover. This could simply be a clear case of Jay-Z the artist making one compromise with his old friend Jay-Z the businessman.

Note: This is the first album cover to not feature Jay-Z. Lucky as it would have been hard to quick change into this one.

And for those interested Alex Goose has released for free “The Blueprint 3 Outtakes” album with tracks that didn’t make the initial cut.

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.

For die-hard fans of thrash, the release of Infidels is a major event. At War were an important part of the underground thrash scenes in the 80’s and were well known for the pro-military themes that run through their work.

The thrash trio hark from Virginia and many of their friends and family are in the military. This could explain why one of their songs includes a po-faced recitation of the Rifleman’s Creed, or why their last album (released over twenty years ago in 1987) was called Retaliatory Strike.

Back in the 80’s the enemies were the communists. Looking at the cover art for At War it doesn’t take long to figure out what the new menace is. Much has been made of the chorus of Want You Dead:

They want you dead
Kuffar die
They want you dead
Open your eyes

And the cover art is as uncompromising, paranoid and aggressive as the lyrics. The artist behind it is Claudio Bergamin, an industry legend that has been responsible for a prolific output of metal covers.

He explains that the album “stands for the band’s values, which are very much America against the Muslim world.” While stressing that this is not his worldview, he says that the cover was designed to be controversial: “I like controversy and I like to make people angry. I think that is one of art’s functions – to generate dialogue and debate. But this particular work does not necessarily represent my personal ideas and values.”

“The band wanted something very straight forward; a statement about how war on terrorism is perceived in America nowadays. They wanted to portray their pride on their way of life and how ready they are to defend it against fundamentalist intolerance.”

“I guess because of the nature of the concept, I wanted something very heroic in a classic way. The message is pure Americanism and let’s be honest, most of the material you get on this matter in movies or comic books is cheesy as hell. I didn’t want that; I didn’t want to go Rambo or GI-Joe. I wanted it to be very elegant. So I pointed my art compass towards classic school – artist like Goya, Caravaggio and Doré.”

It took him several weeks to develop the concept and he jokes that “I think Paul thought I’d escaped with the money at some point!”

The band were happy with the eventual idea “but the character was not right for them: they sent me an email saying: “we like it, but please give the character bigger muscles and long hair”.”

The cover was produced in London.

“I used life models as reference for pose and lighting. The main character was someone my girlfriend knew from the gym and the Muslim warriors are basically my nutcase flatmate Ubaldo Esteban in costume holding a katana for arm position. Next step was painting the illustrated versions of the characters on Corel Painter. I wanted thick brush strokes for it. I painted just four Muslim warriors and just one AK-47 template; I cloned them and slightly varied them on Adobe Photohop to achieve the battalion effect.”

On the anniversary of the day that initiated the “war on terror”, many will be reflecting on the shock and sadness the attacks caused. This cover is a reminder that for many Americans the tragedy also inspired a galvanising and furious anger.

The lead singer of The Strokes will release his debut album sometime shortly, however the cover art has already emerged. It pays tribute to the iconic dog and gramophone image, best known today as the logo for various music companies, including Casablancas’ label RCA.

I’d always just assumed that the image had originated as a logo, perhaps because the owner of the company loved dogs or some such. However, the dog in question actually existed. His name was Nipper.

Nipper earned his name because he always tried to bite visitors on the leg, which makes him sound like exactly the kind of horrid little pencil-sharperner I hate encountering in other’s homes. But there must have been something really special about this dog because after the death of his owner Mark Henry Barraud in 1887 his brothers Philip and Francis continued to care for him.

Francis was an artist and not only did he inherit the little dog, he also took ownership of a cylinder phonograph and recordings of his late brother’s voice. When he played the recordings, he was taken by the way Nipper would look around and wonder where his old owner’s voice was coming from.

It inspired the painting “His Late Master’s Voice”.

It would later be changed to “His Master’s Voice” so that consumers weren’t made to feel too maudlin upon viewing it.

The painting became a logo and icon largely because Barraud himself recognised its commercial potential. He originally pitched it to the Edison Bell company but they thought it was a ridiculous notion that a dog would listen to a phonograph. However the Gramaphone Company ultimately purchased it for 100 pounds sterling after some modification.

Soon their US Partner Victor Records were using a simplified drawing as their logo and reminding consumers to “Look for the dog”.

By that time Nipper had past away, having been buried in 1895 in a beautiful park surrounded by Magnolia trees. And when the park was eventually built upon, a plaque was placed on the resulting building to commemorate Nipper’s resting place.

This pales in comparison to his ongoing status as the mascot for the HMV Group, the most impressive evidence of which is the four-ton Nipper that sits on a building in Albany, New York.

And the Nipper stained glass window.

Not only has this diminutive dog garnered enough large-scale public tributes to satisfy a third world despot, he’s inspired generations of impersonators and posthumously fathered a puppy called Chipper.

And now on the cover of Phrazes for the Young he sits intently at the feet of Casablancas, who seems blissfully unaware that he’s the second most famous guy in the photo.

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.

RIP Jay Reatard (May 1, 1980 – January 13, 2010). This post was written before his tragic death and we were going to edit it (as it reads a little tasteless now). However, on reflection, we felt that this post was a suitable tribute to Jay’s formidable talent.

I was at a play the other week about an alcoholic 28-year old creative director who has it all but throws it away because of his addiction. The sick thing is that instead of feeling for his plight as his life spiraled further out of control, I found myself resenting how much he had to lose. “I’m 28” I thought, “How come I don’t own an apartment with harbour views?”

You know you’re getting older when you find yourself comparing your age with those that have achieved more.

So it is with Jay Reatard (born Jimmy Lee Lindsey), the precocious and prolific punk rocker that started making music when he was barely 15. He has since played with The Reatards, The Lost Sounds, The Bad Times, The Final Solutions, Shattered Records and the Angry Angles before releasing his first solo album in 2006.

Imagine my horror when I discovered that he was born in 1980. While that still makes him slightly older than me I’m unlikely to bridge the gap in a matter of months. Particularly as I can’t play an instrument.

And yet I can find it in my heart to muster goodwill for Reatard, largely because his one-man garage punk revival gave 2008 the soundtrack it so badly needed.

Remember back in ’08? After the bankers had sucked our coffers dry and we woke up to find that in our drunken state we hadn’t only started dressing like it was the eighties, we even managed to out-do that decade’s horrific penchant for unsustainable excess. But at least as we threw our harem pants and ray-bans in the bin and joined the unemployment queue, we had Reatard’s raw, essential music to remind us that it doesn’t take much to make things of beauty.

Reatard and his label Matador also found an incomparably terrific way to release his rough and ready pieces of punk-pop goodness. Throughout the year they released six limited edition 7”, all of which sold out upon release. Interestingly, aside from the circular mnemonic and consistent typography, the sleeves are all unique and distinctive.

While Reatard made this feverish creative output look and feel effortless, on the cover of the resulting compilation we see the exhausted reality. Weighed down by his singles, with vinyl crawling up the wall, the sweaty and uncomfortable musician looks much more than his 28 years. Serves him fucking right.