No Age album art revealed

"Everything in Between" will be out Sept. 28 on Sub Pop.

Like "Nouns," the artwork is striking, and designed by Brian Roettinger.

I think I dig "Nouns" artwork a bit more, but this will do.

Keillor v. Art

The following includes half formed opinions and thoughts, hastily typed and "published." Disagreements are welcome:

Garrison Keillor wrote a fairly funny column about art last week. Apparently he's not a big fan of gallerias, so we don't have a lot in common there. His rant against the visual arts seemed to (in his standard, enjoyably facetious tone) fulfill some need to confirm his knuckles-and-blood masculinity, but I did agree wholeheartedly with one of his statements, quoted here:

"I see no reason to paint flowers. You can buy fresh flowers. Still lifes are only an exercise. And abstract expressionism is for the lobbies of big insurance companies."

haha.

Maybe that's why I like surrealism, cubism, all that (among some impressionists and expressionists and all the other movements that I don't know the name of). The only place you can see giant elephants with spider legs is in a Dali painting. When I open my front door in real life, I don't see the ocean.

The rest of the previous quote, I have a hard time agreeing with:
"The true calling of an artist is to paint women and the greatest challenge is the naked female form. That's what separates the true artists from the wallpaper-hangers."

As you draw, you're just replicating shapes and spaces, meaning the naked form is really no more difficult to replicate on canvas than a flower, unless you are altering or stylizing it in some extreme way, and really does no more to separate the "true artists" from the greeting card scribblers than anything else. Furthermore, if still lifes are completely unnecessary because of the existence of real flowers, couldn't you say the same thing about the naked form? The inspiration that can come from the existence of a living, breathing woman is incomparable to any inspiration from a cold painting, duh.

How can a writer and musician such as Keillor have such a flat, simple appreciation of art? Measuring an artist's ability solely by his aptitude to correctly translating real world shapes and lines to canvas is missing more than half the point of a painting. We don't buy art to hang things on the wall that we can see outside the window. We appreciate art that says something about the indescribable wretchedness and joy of the human condition. A real artist can give even the simple still life mentioned above greater meaning. The flower is no longer just a flower, it's whatever the artist made it to be on convas.

More album cover trends - return of the collage

The collage has long been a part of the rock 'n' roll album-art style book — most memorably punk's political-statement by juxtaposition — but also in classic rock like the Beatles' iconic "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" cover. In fact, the first true album cover, ever, was a rather striking collage, of sorts. It seams the style has come back in vogue, not that it ever went away, but I'm seeing more and more appear on both pop and indie rock covers — not all of them indebted to punk.

Vintage magazines provide the best and most affective source material for album-cover collages, conveying a perverted, commercialized version of past lives and trends. It provides apt ammo for one traditional target of alternative music — consumerism. Or sometimes it just creates a skewed nostalgia affect. With the Internet, creepy old advertisements or any other printed ephemera is almost too easy to gather for art purposes.

I had some fun with this style myself here and here. (anyone in need of an album cover, my services run as cheap as the quality of my work.)

The resurgence:
Oasis - "Dig Out Your Soul" (2008)















Thermals - "Now We Can See" (2009)














Thermals - "The Body the Blood the Machine" (2006)














Heartless Bastards - "The Mountain" (2008)














Panda Bear - Person Pitch (2007)














N.A.S.A. - "The Spirit of Apollo" (2009)
(editors note: this album sucks, but it might be my favorite cover on the list)














Ben Harper and the Relentless 7 - White Lies for Dark Times (2009)

Cover me

Is 2009 the year of washed-out landscapes at dusk? These all look like single frames from the same 16 mm film. I have a soft spot for that slow, warm and flickered look too, but I'm sure there's plenty of graphic designers in need of work, find one. It's not like these album covers were grabbed from across wide ranges of the InterWebs, all of these exist, and are well known within the same indie universe.

Andrew Bird - "Noble Beast"



















Woods - "Songs of Shame"


















Bill Callahan -
"Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle"








That's all I can think of now, I'm sure there's more.