Album Artwork that appeals to you, and is it important anymore?

[{-sapob-}]

(This thread inspired by the Ma/Sw i pod thread)
Personally I loved the recent Mastodon cover as well as the sleeve.



I think what gets me about this is the bright colors i suppose.
Im not an art Connoisseur so i cant go into all that much detail at all.
But it seems very imaginative, which represents the album quite nicely I think.

I think Artwork is still very important.
Im on the side of Steven Wilson here.
There is nothing quite like chucking on a cd/record and just over examining the sleeve or cover, while the album plays through.

With the introduction of MP3 I hope we dont lose "The Complete Package".

 

[Prophet178]

^ Looks even better on vinyl by the way

I would agree about album artwork, and the title of the album. I hate hate hate when bands do a self titled, that just shows that they lack any creativity or imagination (unless it rarely fits with the theme, for example, the latest Wilco record). When everything fits together, the title, the artwork and the music, it just makes a great album even better. The whole album package is something any music lover searches for and savors, because its becoming harder and harder to find today.

One of my favorite all time "whole package" record I have is Godspeed You! Black Emperor's F#A#∞. The vinyl comes in 4(or 3, I can't remember) different album covers, each handcrafted, packaged with a letter envelope with all different sorts of things that have to do with the album as a whole. There is schematics for a train and some sort of ancient device, a Canadian penny flatted by a train, a photograph of something. When I first got the record, and played it while going through all this stuff, I couldn't help but feel dragged in to the album and the world it painted for me, it was truly an experience.

 

[Slunk]

I don't care about artwork at all. I don't even mentally process the art on the things I own. It's all about the music to me. It's not that I dislike the artwork, It's just that I'm more concerned about the music. I think a lot of people (Steven and Mikael in this case) have a lot of nostalgia value with album artwork, so it holds a certain charm for them that my generation missed out on. Not to say that they have a better prespective than anything more than I do, because like I said, at the end of the day it's the music that counts.

 

[Antyman]

all of Matodons album covers are awesome!3
In the belly of a shark by Gallows is pretty nice too.

the album cover is pretty important to me, as it's one of the first impressions you get by the band (unless you dowload it) :/
I remember when I as a kid went to music stores and bought albums with cool covers, without givin a damn about the music.
Yngwie Malmsteen's Trilogy is one of those examples

 

[FRUGiHOYi]

^that looks awesome

 

[To rid you disease]

as long the cover isnt absolutely horrible it doesnt really matter initially. if i after a while find myself enjoying the music, however, a nice cover will somehow make the album appear even better and seem more special to me. thinking of a favourite cover on the top of my head was harder than i thought but ive always enjoyed the covers to cynics focus and consequently also traced in air.

 

[Lateralus14]

I like more simplistic artwork like DsO's Fas or Opeth's GR. But overall it doesn't really matter to me.

 

[Frosties]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

IMO, the best artwork is for Subterrnean Masquerade's Suspended Animation Dreams. Travis Smith drew these bizare images, but his style and colors are just beautiful, and it's completely different than any of his work that I've seen. The pic in my sig is from that album.

 

[i aint play this]

Not very important I guess but I do appreciate the artwork when it's well done. Katatonia & Tool are probably my favorites.

 

[Space Butler]

I also like the Mastodon covers, as well as all of Travis Smith's Opeth covers. I also like a lot of black metal covers, especially In The Shadow of A Thousand Suns by Abigail Williams and In the Nightside Eclipse by Emperor.

 

[i aint play this]

I'm not really into extreme metal covers, be it black metal or death metal.

 

[{-sapob-}]

Not very important I guess but I do appreciate the artwork when it's well done. Katatonia & Tool are probably my favorites.

Fuck yeah, I forgot all about tool.
The packaging for tools 10,000 days was awesome,
The images once looked through the goggles(tool vision?) were/are awesome.
never seen anything like it.

 

[greasyboat]

basically sums up how you feel when listening to the album.

 

[outerone]

Very important, not to enjoy the music but still important. Im a very visual person (hence im a graphic designer) so I have always been drawn to amazing record covers. For instance the Mastodon albums are really great, unfortunately no matter how much I want to like them because of their covers... I cant. But anyways, for album covers add another dimension on top of the music, another world. I often find myself associating images and especially a color to music which is based on the covers. Like Watershed summons all kinds of green images to me and that is all dictated by the artwork. It that sense artists and designers have a real duty to interprit the music.

Hopefully album artwork will never die!!!

A few of my favorite album covers:

Some of the packaging for those albums go waaaay beyond the front cover, its all about the whole experience of opening the package, feeling the materials and browsing the booklet.

If I had to choose the best album cover... Massive Attack, 100th Window. they made a glass mould of a person and shot it with a bullet to shatter it, one take.

 

[outerone]

Cool blog about album art work: http://sleevage.com/

 

[Obtuse]

 

[{-sapob-}]

Actually, One would have to have a special mention to opeth for their cipher in the recent watershed.
Its something that gave you a bit of interaction with the book.

 

[Antyman]

(they were supposed to take the picture without Clapton reading comics, but he was so stoned that he refused to put the papers away)

 

[Lateralus14]

Actually, One would have to have a special mention to opeth for their cipher in the recent watershed.
Its something that gave you a bit of interaction with the book.

Or just made you go to google.