Friday, February 8, 2008

The Cover-Up 3.0

In honor of the upcoming Magnetic Fields shows in Northampton on Monday & Tuesday, it's time to resurrect the Cover-Up, our on-going spotlight on crimes against album aesthetics.


This is the most recent Magnetic Fields album, Distortion. To his credit, Stephin Merritt is certainly doing his part to disprove all of those stereotypes linking homosexuality & a knack for design. When I first saw the cover for this, all I could think of was that it almost looked like it should have been on a novelty shirt that some mallrat teenage boy would buy at Spencer's Gifts. Something like this, perhaps.



C'mon! A little more effort! This cover looks like it was thrown together using Microsoft clip art from the early '90s. Points also deducted for the choice of using two non-matching fonts, as well as the less than appealing juxtaposition of the pink/black & red/grey/black color schemes. And I still can't wrap my head around how the little male bathroom sign symbol is supposed to fit into the whole thing. Previous Magnetic Fields album covers haven't exactly set the bar high for stunning displays of graphic design, but this one is really, really fucking bad.

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