5 posts tagged “music”

What's your musical horoscope?  (Put your music player on shuffle and write down the first 10 songs that come up.)  Inspired by Stephanie.

Minor Swing - Django Reinhardt
Sometimes I'm Happy - Benny Goodman
Boys Wanna Fight  - Garbage
Skip Steps 1&3 - Superchunk        
Tabazan - Killing Joke
Make The Night A Little Longer - Palisades
Du Riechst So Gut - Rammstein
Insight - Joy Division
Heart And Soul - Joy Division
Blood On Your Hands - Killing Joke

I can make a pretty interesting story out of those songs, but not right now.

Record label Magnatune has a stack of podcasting goodness to choose from.

Magnatune is worth looking at in general. Here are some excerpts from their stated mission:

We call it "try before you buy." It's the shareware model applied to music. Listen to 488 complete MP3 albums from musicians we work with (not 30 second snippets).

If you like what you hear, download an album for as little as $5 (you pick the price), or buy a real CD, or license our music for commercial use. And no copy protection (DRM), ever.

Artists keep half of every purchase. And unlike most record labels, they keep all the rights to their music.

I haven't bought anything yet (just found them yesterday), but you can bet I will.

What are your three favorite album covers of all-time? Any honorable mentions?

Question submitted by Tamara.

1. It's iconic, it's stark, the name of the band is the art. It says everything about American punk rock that I wanted to say when it came out. "We're here to remove you, and we're doing it with fire."

2. A lot of people at the time thought this album was the moment when the Clash sold out. Horse crap. This album was the moment when the Clash defined themselves as a band inextricably linked to punk rock and the spirit of '77, but also willing to push beyond the borders. The cover itself is an indication of where the Clash is headed: willing to fuck things up, willing to smash it all, and simultaneously laying claim to the entire history of rock and roll (the cover is based on a '50s Elvis Presley cover).

3. This cover causes a completely visceral reaction in me no matter how many times I see it. Unsane had a tendency to create really brutal album covers using real pictures of horrific deaths, but to me this is the best one because it leaves so much to the imagination. (See their Wikipedia entry for the brutal examples. You have to click through the discography to get to the meat, as it were, so that link above is safe.)

Honorable Mention There are some technical problems with this cover that aren't apparent in the JPG, but it gets honorable mention for a few reasons: 

1. Conceptually I love it, and the execution is really pretty good, considering Point 2
2. It was the first album cover that I can take credit for, as well as my first real collaboration with Mike Monteiro. King Coffey (of the Butthole Surfers and the guy who ran Trance Syndicate) wanted the guy with the gun, Mike had the vision, and we both spent hours drawing the clipping path around that guy in Photoshop on my IIcx and creating the patterned background, then making dinner and having a beer while waiting for it to render.
   
3. My band is on it (Drain)
   

As a post-script, I have to say that I think the decline of the 12" vinyl format caused much more damage to album art than to the audio quality of recordings. I don't think anyone has created a really great CD cover (and I've created or worked on several myself). I have some theories about why that is, but mostly it has to do with the size of the CD cover.

A 12" album cover is worth sitting and staring at like a big picture book or hanging on the wall. A 5.5" CD cover is barely worth exploring; the jewel boxes are unpleasant, getting the booklet out is unpleasant, and the designers almost invariably don't use the space effectively. It's like they're all still thinking about the 12" format and not really embracing the constraints of the medium.

Even the attempts at alternative formats for covers (DVD-sized covers, the all-in-one cardboard jewelbox-sized folders, etc.) have failed to impress.

I have hopes that as bands and musicians move toward digital distribution, there will be a move to create web sites for albums, but maybe that's even too retro. Maybe the music should finally have a chance to stand on its own and not get tied forever to some graphic designer's interpretation of a band's idea (or worse, a marketing shill's idea) of what the cover should look like.

A free list of number one hits by date at Wikipedia.

August 15, 1964: "Everybody Loves Somebody" by Dean Martin

August 10-17, 1985: "Shout" by Tears for Fears.

Both meh, although "Everybody Loves Somebody" is noteworthy for having replaced "Hard Day's Night" by the Beatles.

I would have ignored the whole 6/6/6 date thing if I hadn't stumbled on this song while randomizing my iTunes library.

Agony Column was a metal band of some friends back in Austin. They described themselves as "Hellbilly Deathmetal". Their guitarist, Stuart Laurence, maintains a page for the band

on MySpace (turn your speakers down before you click that link). He's now in a band called Ignitor.