Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)

Animal Collective‘s 2009 album was a critically acclaimed breakthrough for the freak folkers — and featured an appropriately eye-catching cover. Based on a type of optical illusion called illusory motion that was developed by Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka, the design is created in such a way that staring at any part of it creates the illusion that the periphery sections are moving, despite the fact that it is obviously a static image.

V roce 1964 vyšla ve Spojených státech deska The Beatles s názvem Meet The Beatles. Obal desky žádným nápadem nevyniká, ostatně posuďte sami: ,
ovšem o 10 let později vydala svůj debut daleko zajímavější formace, fenomenální popová kapela ze severní Luisiany The Residents. Deska se jmenuje Meet The Residents a její obal na Beatles odkazuje. s hudbou je to "malinko složitější", ale to je na delší esej :)

Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin (1969)

Led Zeppelin's front cover, which was chosen by Page, features a black-and-white image of the burning Hindenburg airship ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_129_Hindenburg ). The image refers to the origin of the band's name itself: when Page, Jeff Beck and The Who's Keith Moon and John Entwistle were discussing the idea of forming a group, Moon joked, "It would probably go over like a lead balloon", and Entwistle allegedly replied, "...a lead zeppelin!"

Estetiku a stylizaci psychobilly kapel mám docela rád (i když je to pořád to samé dokola). Nedlouho tomu jsem byl na Demented Are Go! na sedmičce a Sparky mě velice potěšil "zapíchnutou" injekcí do lebky. Která navíc vydržela celou show.



Demented Are Go - Welcome back to Insanity Hall (2012)

Demented Are Go! are a Welsh psychobilly band that was formed around 1982 in Cardiff. They were one of the earliest in the initial wave of bands to mix punk rock with rockabilly, and as a result, are considered to be highly influential to the psychobilly scene.

The Cramps - Songs the Lord Taught Us (1980)

k obalu nic nemam, ale jeden pribeh aspon:
Dear the Cramps,

So I bought this album the other day because my girlfriend said she had cramps and she didn't want to make out. So I start thinking, why would some old band make my girlfriend not want to make out with me?

After looking around the record store for a while I got this album and then I took it home and called her and said "Don't worry, I don't need to make out either, I've got The Cramps too." Then I turned it on and fiogured it all out.

Your band totally makes people not want to make out. I think it even makes people sick, mostly girls. At school I always hear girls saying, "Oh, my cramps are so bad." And I'm like, "Well, why don't you just try listening to something else?"

Yours,
Superdude

Swans - The Seer (2012)

Frontman Michael Gira described the album as taking "30 years to make. It's the culmination of every previous Swans album as well as any other music I've ever made, been involved in or imagined. But it's unfinished, like the songs themselves. It's one frame in a reel. The frames blur, blend and will eventually fade." The artwork from the album is by Simon Henwood, and features Gira's teeth.

Biffy Clyro - Only Revolutions (2009)

The album is named after the novel Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski. Bassist James Johnston notes: "The nice thing is that it's a story told from two points of view and Simon got married last year and I think it's a love record in that regard, it's about his relationship with his new wife. A lot of it is about trying to take arguments from somebody else point of view and be able to see two sides of the picture."

Miles Davis - Bitches Brew (1970)

Mati Klarwein, the painter of the artwork, was a European Jewish refugee from Nazism, who studied with Dali. He also painted the sleeve for Santana's Abraxas, the rock equivalent of Bitches Brew.

What does the picture mean? Miles is stating that the roots of jazz, of blues, of rock and of civilisation began in Africa. It is also a unification between black and white, between rock and jazz. The thunder in the distance suggests the turbulence of the grooves within: this was the way forward – the jazz-rock fusion thunder. Ultimately, the sleeve matches the (new) Directions in Music by Miles Davis, in that the figures on the painting are embracing, staring into a technicoloured new future for jazz. It is saying that jazz can go into rock, and will do amazingly.

Radiohead - Hail To The Thief (2003)

Hail to the Thief's artwork was created by Stanley Donwood, who has produced the artwork for every Radiohead album since The Bends. The cover art, titled "Pacific Coast", is a road map of Hollywood, with words and phrases taken from Los Angeles' roadside advertising, such as "God", "TV" and "oil", in place of buildings. Donwood said: "Advertising is designed to be seductive and attractive and, in a lot of ways, it's very beautiful. But there's something unsettling about being continually sold something. I liked taking the elements of roadside advertising out of context because it removes the imperative and just goes to the essence of it – the pure heart of advertising."
Other words in the artwork were provided by Yorke, who made lists of words "that rang bells in my head" from the political discussion surrounding the September 11 attacks and subsequent War on Terror; many of the words also appear in the album's lyrics. Comparing it to the more subdued colours of his earlier Radiohead covers, Donwood described the cover's bright, "pleasing" colours as "ominous because all these colours that I've used are derived from the petrol-chemical industry (...) None of it is natural. It essentially comes from black sludge.

New Order - Power, Corruption & Lies (1983)

Peter Saville's design for the album had a colour-based code to represent the band's name and the title of the album, but they were not actually written on the sleeve itself.



The cover is a reproduction of the painting "A Basket of Roses" by French artist Henri Fantin-Latour, which is part of the National Gallery's permanent collection in London. At the gallery Saville picked up a postcard with Fantin-Latour's painting, and his girlfriend mockingly asked him if he was going to use it for the cover. Saville suggested that the flowers "suggested the means by which power, corruption and lies infiltrate our lives. They're seductive." The cover was also intended to create a collision between the overly romantic and classic image which made a stark contrast to the typography based on the modular, colour-coded alphabet he created solely for the band.
It is also said that the owner of the painting (The National Heritage Trust) first refused Factory Records access to it. Tony Wilson, the head of the label, then called up the gallery director to ask who actually owned the painting and was given the answer that the Trust belonged to the people of Britain, at some point. Wilson then famously replied, "I believe the people want it." The director then replied, "If you put it like that, Mr Wilson, I'm sure we can make an exception in this case."

The Mars Volta - De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003)

De-Loused became, both critically and commercially, the band's biggest hit, eventually selling in excess of 500,000 copies despite limited promotion, and was featured on several critics' "Best of the Year" lists. The cover artwork is by Storm Thorgerson.

Anton Corbijn pro Depeche Mode. Rok 1990. Violator. Příroda v jádru je obklopena artificiální a elektrizující krásou a mořem temnoty. V hudbě i na obalu. Škoda toho pravého horního rohu.




SCHWITA: Sorry, už si budu dávat bacha.

2NDREALITY:



Andy Warhol, Birmingham Race Riot, 1964

The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

The album cover for The Velvet Underground & Nico is recognizable for featuring a Warhol print of a banana. Early copies of the album invited the owner to "Peel slowly and see"; peeling back the banana skin revealed a flesh-colored banana underneath. A special machine was needed to manufacture these covers (one of the causes of the album's delayed release), but MGM paid for costs figuring that any ties to Warhol would boost sales of the album. Most reissued vinyl editions of the album do not feature the peel-off sticker; the original copies of the album with the peel-sticker feature are now rare collector's items.



In January 2012, the "Velvet Underground" business partnership (of which John Cale and Lou Reed are general partners) sued The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York after the Foundation licensed the cover's banana design to Incase Designs for use on a line of iPhone and iPad cases.

Underworld + tomato art design collective

tomato is an art design collective founded in 1991 in London by John Warwicker, Steve Baker, Dirk Van Dooren, Karl Hyde (of Underworld), Rick Smith (of Underworld), Simon Taylor, and Graham Wood. Tomato's work includes television and print advertising, corporate identity, art installations, clothing, and of course the design for Underworld's various channels of output. In its existence, tomato has built an international reputation for working across different media, creating designs for all manner of clients such as Reebok, Adidas and Levi's; and identity for museums and cultural centers.



Underworld - Dubnobasswithmyheadman (1994)

Tomato designed the artwork for Dubnobasswithmyheadman. It features black and white type that has been "multiplied, smeared, and overlaid" so much that it is nearly unreadable, alongside a "bold symbol consisting of a fractured handprint inside a broken circle".
According to the authors of The Greatest Album Covers of All Time, the cover "set a new standard of presentation for subsequent Dance albums". In Graphic Design: A New History, Stephen Eskilson cites the cover as a notable example of the "expressive, chaotic graphics" that developed in the 1990s, a design style he calls "grunge". Paul Zelevansky of the journal Substance says that "the packaging … replays the visual poetry of the 1960s and '70s and fast forwards to the alchemical transformations of computer graphics packages.

další spolupráce Underworld a tomato:

Interpol - Our Love to Admire (2007)

At first glance the cover looks like an image from National Geographic or a still from an Animal Planet documentary. On closer inspection you see that the animals are in-fact taxidermy. The cover and inside imagery are the work of New York photographer Seth Smoot. Most of the images are staged in a dry or cold landscape and depict harsh scenes from the animal world.

Somehow the artwork seems to make sense when listening to the album. Interpol’s traditional black, white and red colour scheme is gone (which could reflect the bands move to a major record label) but a bleak atmosphere is still prevalent.

There is also some beautiful typography provided by David Calderley.

Massive Attack - Mezzanine (1998)

The sleeve for Massive Attack’s 1998 album, Mezzanine, was conceived and executed by band member Robert Del Naja (also known as “3D”) along with collaborator Tom Hingston. The pair took a photograph created by fashion photog Nick Knight — who had once snapped shots of insects for the Museum of Natural History — and manipulated it into a stunning (and somewhat frightening) nightmare of an album cover. “Knight added a metallic edge to the image by combining several color copies together and photographing them.”