Post Cool Album Covers

[Buck Birdseed]

Best 7" single cover ever:

[Dauphin]

Not an album, but a nice single cover.

[RedFred]

Some great covers have been posted. And also a few that I don't really like.

If I had to pick one album I think it would be Supertramp's Breakfast in America. I don't think I would have 'got it' if it wasn't for the waitress's nametag 'Libby'.

The golden age of album covers seems to have come and gone. IMHO the medium reached a peak in the '60s and '70s and has been declining since.

Before the 1960s, colour photos were expensive and uncommon. And the techniques for producing album covers with mixed colours didn't seem as good. Many of the records were smaller 'singles' so you didn't have as much room to work with. The move towards buying big LPs for popular music got a big boost with the Beatles because even their album tracks were usually very good.

By the 1970s other formats such as cassette (retch!) and 8-track (double retch!) became more common. Both had less room for big album cover artwork.

In the 1980s the emergance of the 'music video' as a popular art form seemed to give musicians a whole new avenue for promotion. So a great cover was no longer as important. Later on in the 1980s CDs replaced most LPs. Again, a smaller format with less visual effect than the LP.

And of course now you have the internet, and niche radio opening up more alternative opportunities for promoting bands. As well as CD burners and free downloading which cuts into the big budgets record companies used to allocate for covers.

[RedFred]

Anyway a few other albums I like, but you'll have to look them up if you don't know them because I am terrible at posting pictures:

The comic album covers like...

Doug and the Slugs Cognac and bologna
The Flying Lizards
The Monks Bad Habits
Dread Zepplin Un-Led-Ed

Dark humour...

E.L.O. Face the music
Supertramp Crisis? What Crisis?

Albums that the band looked like they enjoyed making...
The Shuffle Demons Bop Rap
Shriekback Go Bang!

The past/future motif...

Neil Young Trans
Walter Carlos Switched on Bach

Sexy album covers have been coming out forever. I don't care for too much nudity like the inside of Queen's Jazz or even Hendrix's Electric Ladyland. Even Herb Albert's Whipped Cream and other delights is a bit much.

Better is a strangely erotic cover like Bill Lastwell's Imaginary Cuba which features a clothed, pregnant but somehow very sexy woman. And the Kate Bush album Never Forever where she has butterflies, birds and strange Hobbit-like creatures flying out of her crotch is better still.

A couple more recent albums I like with artwork utilizing both the front and back CD covers...

Radiohead Kid A
Massive Attack Mezzanine

[Mercator]

Let me see...

You've certainly all seen this one:


I think this one's great too...


And how about this one?


And a personal favourite (although every 4-man band seems to have one of those... Does anyone know who was first with this?):


And there's more than Queen, let's not forget









That's enough precious bandwidth for now.