by Brandon Goei | August 9th, 2011
For a band coming out of LA, you expect Autolux to be more than a little over-stylized. The minimal, monochrome photography on the cover of Future Perfect proves that assumption to be true. Today, the image is straightforward enough to make any bearded post-ironic hipster cringe, but back in 2004 (ancient history in Internet time) this was the face of a band that had their aesthetic down with little room for cheapened reinvention.
The balloons on the cover art are direct enough: they’re like glowing silver molecules, bunched together uncomfortably but still shining in their own right. It’s a “future perfect” image of a pre/post-apocalyptic LA demographic — the unchanging, inflated luster of a city that is too self-aware for its own good.
It could be an elaborate ruse. In the course of the album’s eleven tracks we get tiny hints of the tongue-in-cheek wit needed to successfully pull the band out of trite naiveté and into the direction of Bonfire of the Vanities: Beverly Hills. Some of the best parts of “Here Comes Everybody” take off in directions of pop genius, specifically ringing chorus that consists of blown out power chords underneath a generic “Sha-la-la, let’s go!” As dull as it sounds on paper, it kicks ass in stereo, sticking itself to the insides of your skull like a glam punk parasite. But as a potential satire on the dumb nature of modern pop, it sags from its success. The band might be attempting to portray themselves as stark, intelligent minimalists through their artwork, but how much intelligence do you need to enjoy a little “sha-la-la”?
The opening track from Future Perfect gives a push in the direction of pure, dumb fun. “Turnstile Blues” starts off the record with a crushing example of power drumming from Carla Azar, pummeling the air like artillery raining from the sky. Soon after, guitar, bass and vocals add their contributions in swirling chords and enigmas, and before you know it, you’ve got a solid track and a tapping foot. There’s no trace of smirking satire or smart-ass double entendres. These are a powerful phrases written for the honesty of performing a powerful song.
For me, this is an example of an album that I’ll remember for its flaws as much as I’ll remember for its strengths. The band has an uncanny ability to sound nimble and light while crushing your soul under kickdrums and distortion, much like the cramped luster of the cover art. A the same time, the band also tend to be frightfully honest in their lyrics. And maybe it’s the cynical post-modern soul in me speaking, but it gets a little cheesy to be enjoyed more than a little at a time.
Artist: Autolux
Album: Future Perfect
Year: 2004
Tracklist & Review (Allmusic)
For more album art review, visit Probably Just Hungry.
by Brandon Goei | August 2nd, 2011
Artwork aside, there are good ideas and bad ideas for album packaging. Don’t get me wrong – I get it: an album is a work of art, and works of art are supposed to push the boundaries from time to time. Raise questions. Challenge ideals. Get you thinking. Packaging, along with artwork, is often the first encounter you have with the album’s statement, and it’s also one of the most-neglected portion of the statement, so why not bring it to the foreground? Somewhere between concept and reality, that vision gets lost in translation. Below we recount seven examples of bizarre album packaging in order from whimsically unnecessary to undeniably horrifying.
1. The Simpsons Movie Soundtrack (2007)
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Pros: It’s thematic, novel and playful. As the iconic craving for Homer Simpson’s American “everyman”, there’s nothing quite like fried dough, glazed with an unnatural pink sheen, dotted with little bits that taste like chalk, and filled with purple stuff (which, according to Homer, is a fruit).
Cons: First and most egregiously, the donut has no hole, which makes it look kinda like a frosted Saturn peach or something. Second, the case actually smells like a donut, which carries a high ick-factor if your collection is housed in anything without access to an occasional breeze. (Although it could be a nice conversation piece if you had to explain to someone why your Pantera CDs smell so delicious.)
Aside from that, storage is predictably awkward if you want to store it on your shelf. CDs are round and CD cases are not — there’s a reason for this. Which, actually leads us into…
2. Public Image Ltd. – Metal Box (1979)
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Pros: It’s sleek and futuristic, especially from the man who was tooling around with ransom type on pink backgrounds only two years earlier. John Lydon, frontman of PiL, also collected vinyl, and he claims that the 12-inch canister properly protected his records.
Cons: Storage. Definitely. While the Simpsons Movie Soundtrack’s donut was a circular case, it also came in a box, which was designed to be a generic and uninspired version of a Krispy Kreme box. It was bulky, but at least it kept the thing from rolling off your shelf.
Second, according to owners of original metal canister, the three 12″ records inside were only separated by thin sheets of paper, and fitted extremely close to the edge of the container, making damage to the vinyl almost inescapable. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts.
It’s also worth nothing that a major problem with any “Special/Collector’s/Limited Edition” packaging is the cost shouldered by the producers. This innocent looking metal box container apparently forced the band the give up most of their advance (out of their own wages) in order to pay for the costs.
3. The Durutti Column – The Return of the Durutti Column (1979)
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Pros: Classic Factory Records design. It’s minimal, industrial and subversive.
Cons: Taking a cue from Situationist International member Guy Debord and his first book on psychogeography titled Mémoires, the entire sleeve of the early limited run of The Return of the Durutti Column is created with industrial grade sandpaper, which means that the sleeves of whatever records you store next to FACT 14 will be eventually destroyed. Is there any other statement more mischievous, more self-important, more quintessentially Factory Records than destroying other works of art with your own?
by Brandon Goei | July 26th, 2011
Being a music critic at any moderately official publication comes with many perks, the most obvious of which might be frequent and complimentary exposure to live music. Local, national and international acts come and go, for better or for worse, but you always get a spot in the crowd to experience the dizzying blend of art and sound firsthand. You’ll see, then, why I threw a minor tantrum last night after I realized that I inadvertently blew off Thee Oh Sees on Saturday night.
I like to think that reviewing shows is a win-win-win situation; the band gets exposure and written account of their impact, the record labels could show some sort of increase in profit from that exposure, and I, of course, get to see a concert (and get paid for it). Likewise, not going just seems like the exactly opposite of all those circumstances. No one wins. Easily the biggest disappointment of my week, Thee Oh Sees played at the Empty Bottle, likely playing songs from their newest effort Castlemania, but in honor of the fall of best laid plans, I’m taking a look at the record that sparked my own fandom for the San Francisco-based act, Help.
On first glance of the album art (and maybe upon learning of the band’s geographical origins) you can see what kind of experience you’re in for. With a purple, hand-drawn bizarro bat and a bent rainbow, it’s definitely a “freak out” kind of album. The meticulous detail behind the caricatures stands testament to the weird energy and swirling, festering waves of shitty stereo blips and haze. The high-contrast color bleeds breaks through the flat surface and paints a picture of a nightmarish, white-knuckle acid trip through the SF freak scene.
Early in the album, “Ruby Go Home” sets up a quirky backdrop for Thee Oh Sees to work in. Repetitive and noisy, the guitars and vocals (both adequately squawky) set off at a blistering pace without much help from the bass guitar. The drums, although providing a solid pace, are somewhat pushed into the background. When the bass finally kicks in, the rhythm section finally starts to shine, bouncing with a little help from some extremely distorted staccato blips. At about 1:30, you can hear the full four-piece symphony at work as the guitar crashes into its first feedback drenched freakout. Everything is whole again. The barrage won’t be stopped.
Though the band is well-known for keeping the energy perennially high, their best use of crescendo happens on the B-side jewel “Soda St. #1″. A few warped guitar and vocal blips lead off the recording, pointing directly to a strum-and-drum rush and evenly-paced vocal triplets. All of this leads up to the surge of the song’s wordless chorus — a rushing hum of “ah”s. The song is only 2 1/2 minutes long, so the band makes the build-up count, taking only 10 seconds to get to the release and another 15 after that to get to the chorus.
Thinking back on my first exposure to this album makes me long for the days when I still had a car on the roads of southern California, where you actually had the room to safely go 80 mph and not hit three cyclists, a bus and an elderly woman crossing the street. It’s definitely a ‘get-there-quickly-and-moderately-unsafely” type of album, characterized by the bleeding reverbed echo and scorching instrumentation. You’d see purple bats and rainbows too if you were getting going a thousand miles per hour.
Artist: Thee Oh Sees
Album: Help
Year: 2009
Tracklist & Review (Allmusic)
For more album art reviews, visit Probably Just Hungry.
by Brandon Goei | July 19th, 2011
For the greater portion of the 1990s, Tom Waits left an imprint on the music world as the shaded figure above, forever distorted in a moment of anguish. Something about the photo keeps your eye moving around, imaging the possibilities at the instant of the snapshot. None of them are that great. In fact, they read like a laundry list of biblical plagues: torture, insanity, panic, mental illness, and so on. The typeface that frames Waits’ face offers no sense of symmetry and features smudges in wildly different directions, offering no sense of continuity of motion. It’s a mess.
But of course, if you’re at all acquainted with the work of Tom Waits, you’ll recognized that it’s never really all that organized in the first place. His mid-1980s classics feature the kind of wild artistic flailing that made him famous, with seemingly random horn sections or junkyard percussion jumping out from behind the shaded corners of the albums. That endearing disorganization didn’t go anywhere in the years leading up to Bone Machine, but Waits did manage to gain enough cohesiveness to make an album held together by a singular theme. And the theme is decay. Festering, rotting, tortuous, mortal decay.
In terms of clarifying the album concept, it gets no easier than reading the titles of the first few songs: “Earth Died Screaming”, “Dirt In The Ground”, and “Such A Scream”. But a little further down, an oddly opaque song titled “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me” pops up. Starting with the dull boom of a David Lynch score, Waits drawls his voice through bullhorns and soggy marshes in lyrical free verse. Ominous, morbid and bizarre, this track isn’t the first to bring up the themes of the record, but it is the first to really get you scratching your head.
Right after the deeply disturbing “Ocean” comes the bouncy little ditty “Jesus Gonna Be Here”, which follows suit with a traditional African-American spiritual. Hearing Waits switch gears so quickly is part of the treat here, since he seems to do it seamlessly (there’s even a bit of a lisp in this track, just to put the experience over the top). And though both sample tracks talk about incoming harbingers of mortal ends, “Jesus” finds its tongue in its cheek the whole way through, hinting at materialistic tendencies (“brand new Ford”) and corporeal pleasures (“I’ve been so good / except for the drinking”). The cherry on top of this sundae is the candid cough included at the end of the recording session, which seems to prod even more at that final moment.
At the end of it all, Bone Machine is an album whose content may not leave you in deep thought (a weakness shared with Waits’ seminal 80s records), but does leave an odd taste behind. All the mixing of bounce with gruff along with a palpable weirdness keeps the creative juices flowing, and when the theme is something as singularly powerful as mortality, there’s no mistake that a cohesive experience is on the way.
Artist: Tom Waits
Album: Bone Machine
Year: 1992
Tracklist & Review (Allmusic)
For more album art reviews, visit Probably Just Hungry.
by Brandon Goei | July 12th, 2011
Believe it or not, despite present transgressions Weezer was actually a reasonable band to be a fan of. Long before the Gaga covers, or the awkward cowboy hat, or “raditude”, or the bassists filing lawsuits/going crazy, this was a band of humble beginnings writing about what they knew: shining their own geeky light on the world. Weezer might not have been the first band to explore nerdy concepts, but their first self-titled album, otherwise know as The Blue Album, was one of the first to do so in such an anthemic fashion.
Looking back on the solid 90s anti-fashion on the cover (ringer tees and bowling shirts, anyone?) it’s not hard to picture the kind of clique these guys could have formed in high school. Everyone had that group somewhere on the quad, playing Dungeons & Dragons in between advanced placement classes or discussing Ender’s Game to unbelievable detail, but what the cover states is so plain to the eye that it might be hard to notice it at first. It’s just four guys as they are, with no stereotypes or agendas present. Three years prior to the Blue Album in 1991, the message of Nirvana‘s own self-defining call-to-arms rang out to disenchanted teens: “Come as you are.” Weezer took the message and ran it in a different direction; not with patched flannel or ripped jeans, but with their keen vision of the other set of outcasts present on the playground.
I would be hard pressed to write anything about this album without including Weezer’s first full-fledged stadium stomper. Perhaps as a reaction to the popularity contests inherent in life, the band writes this song with absolutely no continuity in mind, babbling nonsensical phrases from line to line that tell a faint story. It’s actually the title of the song (“Buddy Holly”) that lends a theme to the sound of and the video for the track, which seems to cover an episode of bullying. Absurd but loveable: that’s the feel of early Weezer we can all get behind.
“In The Garage” covers the idea of a safe haven for the band, something important in the life of those persecuted high schoolers who may identify with Rivers Cuomo et al. It may also be the easiest song to view in context of what I mentioned before since it mentions loads of names presumably held as hallowed in the eyes of Cuomo. We get a unique glimpse in the life of the band as the list reads on: Kitty Pryde & Nightcrawler (X-Men) and Ace Frehley & Peter Criss (lesser known members of Kiss), along with mentions of a Dungeon Master’s Guide & 12-sided die (Dungeons & Dragons). Perhaps even more poignant is the inclusion of the song “Holiday” immediately after “In the Garage”, where Cuomo realizes the space by singing, “Let’s go away for a while / you and I / to a strange and distant land / where they speak no word of truth / but we don’t understand anyway.”
Quirky, loveable and obsessive: aren’t these the qualities we value greatly today in our current nerd-based society? Weezer had the aesthetic down pat, singing to crowds of the downtrodden millions sitting out the prom and watching Doctor Who reruns (Tom Baker or David Tennant?). Although it didn’t seem like it at the time, the hybrid-nerds that Weezer portrayed themselves as are the types that run to world today. Long after “In the Garage” mentioned X-Men, Kiss, and D&D, all three enjoyed some time in the spotlight in one way or another: The X-Men story has spurred five films to date (for better or worse); the epic fantasy aesthetic has spurred film adaptations of Lord of the Rings along with its copycats; and all of a sudden Gene Simmons is a reality TV star.
But even with all the hubbub about the rise of the nerds, it’s just a shame that albums with as much understated power as Weezer’s first and its beautifully plain (and possibly prescient) album portrait are hard to come by anymore.
Album: Weezer (Blue)
Artist: Weezer
Year: 1994
Tracklist & Review (Allmusic)
For more album art reviews, visit Probably Just Hungry.
by Brandon Goei | June 28th, 2011
If you’ve ever been to a dark, and perhaps questionable, club, you’ve no doubt seen this scene. Androgyny embodied, checking his/her eyeliner in the wings of an equally questionable restroom. The artwork in these restrooms is usually like an amplified version of the feel of the venue, as if it functions as the shit-stained, bleeding/beating heart of the space. It’s a place that embodies any sort of love/hate feelings you’ve got for the venue, and a place that can literally take all the misplaced thoughts of the crowd and put them on the walls, staring you in the face when you feel you ought to have at least a shred of privacy.
Cold Cave puts all these elements together on the cover of their debut LP Love Comes Close, whose music has much in common with the piss-streaked graffiti well pictured. Out on the floor, you might not notice anything but the beats, bells and whistles. It works to your advantage when all you want is the purity of dance floor economics. But when you retreat for a moment into the restroom, the flavor of the music changes. The sound system blares muffled through the walls, but ultimately it’s a quieter place where the dancing animals created by those raucous hymns retreat for a few minutes. If the music has a consciousness or any sort of empathy, this is where it lives.
“The Laurels of Erotomania” starts with a strong synthy beat, decorated by a skewed sample and a candid cough. The track would function well as an entirely instrumental piece, shifting between two phrases and puncuated by staccato machine noise. But when the chorus kicks in (a resounding and repetitive “People pay attention to me / I don’t know why”) the song takes on a decidedly more meaningful direction, raising questions of the social machinations out beyond the restroom stall.
“Youth and Lust” rings out from the start like a rebooted New Order single with phase-y synth strings and boy/girl call-and-response lite. Like the previous sample track, this one revolves loosely around themes of humanity on the dance floor. Yearning and monotone, both vocalists echo memories of an empty evening out with moody lyrics like, “You miss the disco lights / It’s all pleather now / A synthetic world without end” and mirroring the cosmetics-toting freakshow on the front, tending to dance floor wounds with a make-up brush.
As a final twist, you can see that the compact mirror pictured bears the same type of design as the wall in the background, further blurring the lines between what is and isn’t part of the club. Is that little tool of self-reflection a part of the club scene after all? Maybe the person pictured is truly one with the venue, instead of an intrepid explorer of him/herself. There don’t seem to be any lines to draw.
Artist: Cold Cave
Album: Love Comes Close
Year: 2009
Tracklist & Review (Allmusic)
For more album art reviews, visit Probably Just Hungry.
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Jul 6, 2011
it’s extra weird when you throw in the fact that vocalist wes eisold used to do this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS_R2t7snk4