It’s time for another look at recent album covers. These are all records released in the second half of Sep­tem­ber.

With its dream-​like tableau the cover for Who Killed Amanda Palmer, the debut album for the Dres­dan Dolls singer Amanda Palmer reeks of sur­re­al­ism. I think Freud would have had a field day analysing this one. Regard­ing the type, listen very care­fully, I shall say zis only once: Futura Con­densed is not a type­face. Not.

To say the cover for Joan Osborne’s pre­vi­ous album didn’t really float my boat is a slight under­state­ment. But Little Wild One is a step back in the right direc­tion, despite the pres­ence of cover-​wide Trajan for the artist’s name. There is a lot hap­pen­ing in that image, with weird colour­ing, bizarre light flares and a sump­tu­ous Polaroid-​style frame. The script is Nick Cooke’s gor­geous brush script Gizmo, a choice option for emu­lat­ing Far-​Eastern cur­sive calligraphy.

The Way I See It by R&B singer Raphael Saadiq beau­ti­fully mimics the ground-​breaking album covers for Blue Note Records in the ’50s and ’60s (as you can see in the fan­tas­tic gallery Fred­erik Berlaen sent me). It all looks looks per­fect – the black-and-white pho­to­graph printed on a flat colour with the type reversed in white – except that the extended Hel­vetica is an anachro­nism. Neue Hel­vetica 33 Thin Extended was only intro­duced in 1983 as part of the reworked family which saw heights and widths har­mo­nized through­out the com­plete series. Already by the ’70s Blue Note had moved on to a quite dif­fer­ent style of album cover design, so by the time the type was avail­able the look of the covers was quite dif­fer­ent. To match this design Trade Gothic Extended should have been used. Basic Com­mer­cial or Venus would also be a pos­si­bil­ity were it not that I don’t recall the latter being used on Blue Note album covers.

On Brass Knuck­les – his long-​delayed fifth album – Nelly is almost lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively caught with his pants down. The strict geo­met­ric square let­ter­ing is BD Billd­ing by BuroDe­struct (thanks, Sander), which is rem­i­nis­cent of Houn­slow. It looks great, it’s just a shame about the deriv­a­tive cover image.

It looks like the sev­en­ties are back with their hyper-​realistic air­brushed album covers. At least the four exam­ples below may hint at the emer­gence of a trend.

Only the modern car model betrays that Nights Out by British elec­tronic artist Metron­omy is a recent album. The spaced out Gill Sans cap­i­tals suit the style of the cover illus­tra­tion and propel the album cover about 30 years back in time.

The cover for Exit 13, the last album on LL Cool J’s con­tract with Def Jam, appro­pri­ates the sig­na­ture style of sur­re­al­ist album covers in the 70s and 80s. I guess some­body thought that a giant micro­phone smash­ing into the high­way was a strik­ing image. One that doesn’t make sense. The high­way sign is a typo­graphic mish­mash – the artist’s name in Univers Ultra Con­densed, the album title… MS Tre­buchet?, and only the bottom line in the cor­rect type­face: Inter­state Condensed.

Me And Armini by Ice­landic singer Emil­iana Tor­rini tricks our senses and plays with our per­cep­tion. The cover in trompe l’œil is a pho­to­graph of the singer attached on a piece of paper with the album title in type­writer text, but both the pic­ture and the pic­ture of the pic­ture are in fact illus­tra­tions. If you happen to need a type­writer font – the best just got better with the baf­fling FF Trixie HD.

For me Ladyhawke, the self-​titled debut album for the New Zealan­der artist Pip Brown has the nicest one of the four album covers. Although the illus­tra­tion still is very real­is­tic, the colour­ing and the unfin­ished qual­ity make it the most inter­est­ing and beau­ti­ful one. The hand drawn sans caps com­ple­ment the design perfectly.

Feed The Ani­mals by Girl Talk has a pecu­liar image on its cover. The burn­ing let­ters con­jure up dis­turb­ing images of the Ku-Klux-Klan in action. It’s a shame the designer chick­ened out and didn’t add the album title to the design. What a cop-​out. :/

I’m not sure if the mis­take in the cover paint­ing for The Hawk Is Howl­ing by Scot­tish post rock­ers Mogwai is inten­tional, but as far as I know this is not a hawk but a bald eagle. Or am I com­pletely miss­ing the point? Appar­ently – not being an Amer­i­can – I didn’t real­ize the bald eagle rep­re­sented the United States of Amer­ica, and the album title refers to “war hawks”, the name given to war­mon­gers or people oth­er­wise given to advo­cat­ing war. This mixed metaphor is a subtle dig at the bel­liger­ent nature of the cur­rent Amer­i­can for­eign policy (thank you Eric Hague for explain­ing this). The very narrow sans is Alter­nate Gothic No.1.

Only By The Night by Kings Of Leon has a great look­ing cover. Mir­ror­ing the image and over­print­ing the copies in black and red on a plain white back­ground make it look like a Rorschach inkblot test. The fun part is that this time there really is an image to be dis­cov­ered in the sym­met­ri­cal pat­tern. The under­stated cen­tred type in Überform, a tech look­ing mono­spaced sans by Bionic Sys­tems (thanks, Marre), is the per­fect com­ple­ment, and the under­scores and single guillemets pro­vide the fin­ish­ing touch.

Hey, another Rorschach-​like album cover design for Lunglight by The Shaky Hands. It’s as if there’s been some­thing in the air lately. This cover looks a lot more sin­is­ter than the pre­vi­ous one by the way. As it’s com­pletely painted and let­tered by hand there’s no type to point out.

I can’t help but be reminded of Tibor Kalman’s fan­tas­tic ver­nac­u­lar inspired designs when I see Dear Sci­ence by TV On The Radio. The mis­matched plas­tic let­ters with an upside down “N” and dis­torted “E” make this image strongly resem­ble a design he did for Restau­rant Floret in Man­hat­tan (I couldn’t find the image on the inter­net). Here as well you’d think the type was set by a highly moti­vated ama­teur with lim­ited skills. The slightly awk­ward script is prob­a­bly a free- or share­ware font but nonethe­less it works.

More awk­ward­ness on Motion To Rejoin by indie rock outfit Bright­black Morn­ing Light. Again an amateurish-​looking script with exces­sively loopy bits, which I wouldn’t have minded seeing replaced by Soda Script. Although at first sight the image is pedes­trian it starts to reveal half-​hidden details which make it more inter­est­ing. Check for exam­ple the German mil­i­tary air­craft wing mark­ings in the feathers.

Heavenly Bender by Sam Cham­pion has a colour­ful hand drawn album cover. The ama­teur­ish mix of col­lage and felt pen colour­ing lends it a cer­tain charm. In fact I think the slightly left­field con­cept of ren­der­ing by hand Ver­dana, one of the penul­ti­mate com­puter fonts, is quite endear­ing. It makes it look a bit like those vin­tage sans faces for use in very small sizes, like Doric, Sans No. 1, Spar­tan Clas­si­fied, or Geo­met­ric 212.

Another very colour­ful cover can be found on Now Or Heaven by The Broken West. The design looks a bit like a poor man’s ver­sion of Radio­head’s In Rain­bows. Thanks to the much more pro­nounced colours it’s nice eye candy, but the exe­cu­tion is a less strong. Whereas In Rain­bows uses a non-​descript grotesque, the band name on Now Or Heaven is set in Brag­gado­cio, the lesser known cousin of Futura Black. And the album title is the reg­u­lar Futura.

The cover image for the self-titled debut full-​length album for British trio Friendly Fires is a very nice metaphor. “Friendly fire” is a rather cyn­i­cal euphemism for “weapons fire, such as artillery or aerial bom­bard­ment, from one’s own forces; – used mostly when troops do damage or cause casu­al­ties among their own forces”. The image is sur­pris­ingly del­i­cate in its bru­tal­ity, as the bullet crash­ing the mirror sym­bol­ises hurt­ing one­self. Equally del­i­cate are the Art Deco-​flavoured light sans caps of Neutraface.

The album cover for One Kind Favor by B.B. King may look very main­stream, yet it is a classy com­po­si­tion that suits the blues legend. The rich greys and deep shad­ows lend the pho­to­graph a beau­ti­ful inten­sity, and the text taste­fully set in Agency caps is nicely inte­grated in the image.

Yuck! Slime & Reason by British rapper Roots Manuva has a gross cover image. Nev­er­the­less I can see the humour in the weird­ness. Plus it fits the atmos­phere the artist con­jures up in his music.

Once in a while you come across an image that man­ages to per­fectly depict a con­cept, or in this case inter­pret an album title. I don’t really know why, but some­where in the back of my head I feel that the pho­to­graph on House With No Home by folk band Horse Feath­ers is just… right. No need for type or any other addi­tional ele­ment. Beau­ti­ful and captivating.

This is a tricky one. Is using a paper col­lage for T.I.’s new album called Paper Trail too obvi­ous a solu­tion? The album cover indeed is self-​referential, but at what point does it cross the line and become too much so? I think this design stays on the right side of the divide. It is beau­ti­fully exe­cuted, with lots of atten­tion to detail with­out being too slick. The little inten­tional “mis­takes” in the inter­pre­ta­tion of the por­trait and the rich tex­ture give the art­work an extra dimen­sion, and even the fairly pedes­trian typog­ra­phy in Basic Com­mer­cial can’t detract from the fact that this one’s a winner. Good job.

Tags: album covers, lettering, music