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.

The Cover-Up 2.0

I feel kind of bad for singling this band out in this installment of our album cover Hall of Shame, given that I spent a good chunk of my formative years obsessively going through Touch & Go Records mailorder catalogs & making notes in the margins the way that most fourteen year olds would do with their history textbooks. Making fun of Korn for hideous graphic design (see "the Cover-Up 1.0") is easy because there's obviously NO redeeming value in a Korn album, cover art or otherwise. But this cover is so bad that not even David Yow can be exempt from my criticisms this time around. Not to mention that I wouldn't be able to shake feminist equivalent of Catholic guilt if I didn't call bullshit on this one.



Ladies & gentleman, here we have the cover of Love's Miracle, the new album from Qui, featuring one Mister David Yow of the Jesus Lizard fame. I really shouldn't have to tell you why this is such a terrible album cover, but let's examine this briefly, shall we? For starters, the graphic design looks like something that someone whipped up their high school remedial Photoshop class ("Dude, wouldn't it be, like, so totally awesome if the band's name was spelled out in the clouds by one of those fuckin' SKYWRITING planes?!"). Consider that in conjunction with the ridiculous, gold faux-cursive font they used for the title, that looks like it would be more in place on a flyer for some keg party at a sorority house. Then we have the highly questionable fashion choice of the pseudo-Jim Morrison, open-leather-jacket-with-no-shirt look, but this isn't a column in Esquire or Vogue, so I'll let that one slide. Now we come to the real clincher that sent these guys straight into this esteemed feature in our little blog: the dead naked woman face down in the grass with ants crawling all over her. Now, "classy" was never really a term that I associated with the Jesus Lizard or any of those noisy, ugly early-to-mid-90s Touch & Go/Amphetamine Reptile axis bands. When I'm listening to Shellac or the Melvins or whatever, I'm also not expecting some manifesto that would be better suited to a Bikini Kill record. But this totally crosses into that category of bad album covers that is dominated by angry, young metalcore bands who exclusively write songs about strangling & dismembering their ex-girlfriends who left them for dudes with better nautical star tattoos. Something like this, perhaps?



I had this Qui record in my hands for about a week or so & everytime I looked at the cover, I cringed & suddenly forgot to actually put the album on. Yikes. However, I did finally listen to it & I must say that while I'm glad that the fucked up spirit of the Jesus Lizard is being somewhat channeled in Qui, I could have done without the Frank Zappa & Pink Floyd covers, guys.

The Cover-Up 1.0

This is the inaugural edition of The Cover-Up, the poorly punned* section devoted to the bad album art out there. We're keeping it well-known today, but certainly expect lesser-knowns to crop up for offending your eyeballs.

Prince - Planet Earth


Insulting a Prince album cover is like shooting fish in a barrel. While you can't assume the quality of the music he's going to put out with each full-length, you can always assume atrocious cover art. Can someone actually defend Dirty Mind or Lovesexy and not be a pompous pooshovel? What sets this release apart from past releases is that the cover looks like a tribute to all of the bad hip hop mixtape covers out there. Maybe it's parody, but I doubt it.

Common - Finding Forever


Common decides to bounce back from his classic throwback Be with this and oh boy is it a doozy. Be played it safe, but sometimes playing it safe is the way to go. And if you're going to release a classic hip hop album, a cover like Be's is a surefire way to start things off. That cover had Marvin Gaye written all over it.

So back to Finding Forever's cover. Where does it go wrong? Inappropriate headgear to hide Common's cueball head? Check. Monk hoodie. Random shit popping up all over? Check. You've got a hodgepodge of things just dropped in there, including the Chicago skyline, astral shit, a bird and the sun. Remove Common's head and you'd probably have an album cover that would crop up on a Rooney album.

Korn - Untitled


Two things are brought to mind when looking at this. The first is Magic: The Gathering artwork.


The second is the artwork from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book series.


Hopefully, that was the first and last time Korn will be mentioned in this blog. This concludes the first Cover-Up. Suggestions are welcomed.

*or penned! GROAN

Caught Licking Leather.

I've decided to put together my twin passions of art criticism & rock snobbery in the form of a semi-regular feature in this blog dedicated to excellent albums with excellent album covers. I'm certainly guilty of having slept on really awesome records in the past simply because I thought that their respective bands' taste in graphic design was atrocious, so I figured I'd accentuate the positive for once.



Aside from the fact that I really get a kick out of saying the name "Pissed Jeans" on the radio week after week, these guys are also proudly carrying the torch of early to mid-90s ugly rock in the tradition of the Jesus Lizard & most things that Steve Albini has laid his hands on, which I am most definitely okay with. I've noticed that this revivalism of the Touch and Go catalog from the Clinton era has been in full swing lately, to mixed results, but these Pissed Jeans fellows have gotten the nastiness & the noise down on their new album, Hope For Men, in a way that will make you say "I can't believe it's not David Yow". Major props are due to any band that can make a song about scrapbooking or ice cream sound like the most fucked up, demented thing this side of Nick Cave's house.

And that album cover! I'm a big fan of minimalism in record layouts & this is a perfect example of "less-is-more" done right. Seriously folks, you're not winning any points by using "wacky" fonts & every pattern in your MS Paint application (unless of course you're putting out an album on Load Records). Replace the work pants with chaps & this could almost be a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph, which I mean in the best possible way. Clean, uncluttered layout, elegant black & white color scheme, simple vertical emphasis, adorable display of man-love. What more could you ask for? It's downright iconic in that first Velvet Underground album kind of way. (Brief sidenote: That visible fellow on the cover is Pissed Jeans drummer Sean McGuinness, who was previously in the vastly underrated & ridiculously awesome Washington, DC band Navies, who were more "math rock"/Dischord Records-styled, but also well worth checking out.)