Brightest Young Things

With a great deal of sadness, we tucked away the Judging A Cover By Its Cover column into designer mothballs this year. Not to say/threaten that it couldn’t return in the near future, but there is no chance whatsoever that we would allow 2010: The Year in Packaging to go without comment. You know the drill cats and kittens – several sites provide some halfass version of this and then we layeth the smacketh downeth like our step-sister’s life depended on it, for the fourth year and counting. (Which is to say that we care waaaaay more than they do, but let’s not get carried away like it’s a blood relative or anything.)

This will run much like the usual best and worst listings (and terribly similar to the last three years) but first we need a few ground rules. I will be judging covers based on expectations and possibilities as much as – if not more than – basic aesthetics. This means if you are a pop songstress and you produced a cover with your big ol’ airbrushed yap on the cover with scripty type and filigrees or you are a Top 40 rapper with a tough looking photo of you with your shirt off and bling to the gills draped all over the place – well, of course you did – and Merry Christmas, as I have left a pass under the tree for you.

If you are the bald guy from Live… well, you get a pass because I am just stunned to hear that you are still putting out music and can’t be bothered to view your design by template cover. If you were Eminem – when did you completely give up on this part of your game?

If it universally sucks than I won’t waste my time mentioning it here either (this especially applies to fading stars this year with hokey covers – looking at you Robert Plant, Richard Thompson, Hole, etc…)

As a side note – I wonder how great that Kanye concept would have been if I thought the images in the window were halfway decent? Pretty great I think. Of course, we’ll never know.

If you are a dead serious indie rock band – you might not fare as well… This is for items worthy of discussion only and to shame those that should know better and praise the proud few.

We are stretching this holiday joy into a two day affair, so today will be the red hot, just back from the club, 24 hour romp in the sack (and kitchen and hallway and your roommate’s bed and…) while tomorrow will be the harsh reality that all of the painkillers from your knee surgery are missing from the medicine cabinet and your couch smells like urine and you think that girl that just left your group house in your roommate’s Volvo might be your third cousin.

So yeah – today brings out the BESTies:

Two things happened when compiling the “best” list this year: The first was that I was genuinely appalled with the overall quality of current cover design (even more so than I usually am.) I will rant on that tomorrow – and it will be a doozie – but something even stranger took place, possibly as a reaction to the wretched excess infecting so many of today’s sleeves – I nearly had an all black and white top ten! That would seem unthinkable in a day and age where most records are sold with tiny thumbnails on-line, but it might be the very last trick to fully breakthrough these days and a few designers used it to brilliant effect. Here we go…

One would hope a band with so many touchstones from the indie past would know better than to call themselves Weekend, much less create a search engine nightmare like “Weekend Sports,” but one thing is for certain – when you see this brazenly simple cover you know exactly what flavor of goth-tinged post punk fuzz you are going to encounter. The beauty of this sleeve is not just in the abstract forms (is it burning/melting?), but in all the little bits of dust and blur in the nooks and crannies – just like the music within.

One of the bands evoked by the sound and packaging of Weekend is certainly Joy Division. Studio Parris Wakefield was tasked with wrapping the compilation of Joy Division singles and drew upon little fragments of a fascination with deep space, that revolved around designer Peter Saville’s iconic work. They nearly used images of the Factory nebula (yes, that is it’s real name) before moving to a more involved Hubble image and then stripping it down to it’s bare essentials – something Joy Division did to stark effect. This cover just feels cold and distant. Devastatingly so. (As a side note – the press release from Teenbeat Records that they were suing all parties associated with this package for taking +/- and copying some of their packaging for another component of this set was one of the funniest moments of the year. When Pitchfork ran it as a legitimate news item – it was THE funniest moment of the year. More on Teenbeat a little further down the list.)

No Age and Brian Roettinger (Hand Held Heart) have formed one of the more potent band/designer combos in recent years (and they seem to be becoming a mainstay of this list.) It is tempting to tout Roettinger’s 10” for the Soundscreen Artist Series (also black and white by the way), but this is more direct in it’s single crumpled image. The fuzzed elastic sounds that No Age are mastering, coupled with their disregard for the rules of what is noise and what is shoegaze and what is pop and what is rock have never been fully brought together in the way that the cover image for "Everything In Between" conveys (although that “Losing Feeling” EP last year was damn close AND also black and white!)

Cults elegantly captured their “out of nowhere” dancepop vibe with this type free frozen spastic dancing, that only served to further the buzz and mystery about the pair. They also outdid LCD Soundsystem in creating the perfect LCD Soundsystem cover (the only spot where that act lacked this year.)

Flying Lotus deemed “Cosmogramma” a “space opera.” It definitely sounded like it was from another universe and Leigh McCloskey’s artwork on the cover made the transition from wanting to create another world - but also being able to see the planning (and dreaming) involved. No type on this one either? Must have been a weak year for typography. (Um, yeah, it definitely was.)

Interpol seemed to project an uneasy energy this year – clearly in transition – both the personnel AND personal kind. They took a step away from the elegant cool that they could never quite mastered and opted instead for an elegant dark. It made for an inconsistent album (though any Interpol is extremely worthwhile, if you don’t listen too closely to the lyrics.) The changeover was personified by the after effects styled dimensional type captured in mid-collapse – like a perfectly detached snapshot of their frame of mind at the time.

A tiny bit of color (magenta doodles) ravages the catastrophic ink drawings that adorn Jon Savage’s  “Black Hole” compilation of first wave California punk mavericks. Not only is the damage right there for all to see BUT the caustic and randomly juvenile nature of it all bleeds through. While the compilation itself needlessly misses huge (and vital) elements of the scenes described, it gets the vibe dead on.

“Black Hole” seems like a tough act to one up – especially with a current release – but this crew of vets is more than up to the task. What is not to love about OFF!? It is insanely masculine and juvenile and loud and “of the moment.” This collection of their EPs highlights the brilliant system of design with the roughened type side featuring a different line art illustration each time. This one really says it all. Perfection. If you don’t like this then I am certain you won’t like this record. If you love it – dive in. No sleeve this year manages to more clearly define it’s audience.

Speaking of one-upmanship, it is finally time for a dash of color to enter the picture. Actually, for a band that might be better suited for a black and white sleeve than most around these parts, Clinic selects the poppiest of all titles with “Bubblegum,” and find themselves wrapped in a 50’s Jim Flora-inspired illustration. Finally some type fully integrated (but not lost) in a design, projecting a looser, playful vibe that comes across in very (it is a Clinic album after all) subtle ways on record.

As big a sucker as I am for that look, Slaraffenland’s “We’re On Your Side” stretches it in the hands of Windy City Wunderkind Cody Hudson. (Chicago has such a tiny, but amazing, design scene at the moment - highlighted by Hudson and Sonnenzimmer - both associated with the Hometapes label.) Not reverential in the least, it acts as if Dali had been forced to explain what he wanted, but could only stand behind Flora as he executed it. Magical stuff and just simple graphics at the end of the day –shows how important it is what you DO with the elements you have. The “Meet and Greet” single with this is also breathtakingly gorgeous.

Tracey Thorn and Perfume Genius both skewed basic pop forms in different ways and perfected the “something just feels damaged” feel here by making plain photographs intriguing with simple but dramatic applications.

I have to admit that I really did not care for the Broken Bells album. It seemed like an epic waste of two very distinct talents - where the sum was so much less than the parts. So be it. I have no arguments with the packaging though (just a tiny quibble with the plain type placement on the cover perhaps – it is wonderfully stacked everywhere else, but we can never have everything.) Jacob Escobedo moonlights from his job as Creative Director for Adult Swim to deliver an absolute stunner of a design around his engaging (the tiny window of light works so well and is free of cliché because of the astonishing globe it escapes from) artwork. This kicks ass in every way that the songs don’t.

You didn’t think I was going to let Vaughan Oliver designing a sleeve for David Lynch go by without recognition did you? Two of my very favorites combine for a cover that suits them both like an echoing scream in the night. Strangely beautiful.

My least favorite album of the year (I was never a devout Arcade Fire fan, but I certainly played “Funeral” non stop and for the life of me I can not figure out why I dislike them so much now. Am I not as impervious to overhype as I thought I was, or have they just continued on making records not quite as good as the last?) Regardless, they continued a string of strong packaging. Caroline Robert and Vincent Morriset combine to create the ideal (especially the Xeroxed texture) feel of the Burbs. The coloring style and composition all tweak the notion of nostalgia inherent in vintage hand-tinted postcards. The big kudos come in the area where they could have easily phoned it in – the subtle, exquisite typography seals the deal (I swoon over that raised “F” every single time.) That they keepit up over an extensive system of singles and motion graphics only further serves to confirm my love.

Did we forget Mark Robinson and his Teenbeat joys? No sir. We find them resting here at the bottom of the post (but top of the list.) In what is a very telling scenario, my favorite record sleeve is not for a physical album – but rather an iPad app. hollAnd’s “Sodium Fawn” 5 song EP (or EApp?) continues his surge to perhaps the finest songfucker you should get to know. It is a testament to Robinson’s graphic genius that the design works perfectly no matter which of Trevor Kampmann’s evocative black and white images enter into the frame. If this is the future – the future is a damn sight cooler than the present.

John Foster owns his very own design firm, Bad People Good Things, and he writes lots of books – you should own a pile! “1,000 Indie Posters” is out this very moment, just in time for your holiday shopping. Be sure to pick up “For Sale” or “Dirty Fingernails” or perhaps that paperback of “New Masters of Poster Design” your Granny had her eye on as well.

Previously in END OF YEAR 2010 LISTS:

• 1/21: Songs To Consider ...
• 1/4: The Top Ten Sneakers of 2010
• 12/30: Top Ten Guilty Pleasures of 2010
• 12/21: The Best Musical Moments of 2010
• 12/20: Songs That Made Me! Happy in 2010
• 12/16: Worst Music Packaging Of 2010
• 12/14: Top 10 Movie Superlatives of 2010!
• 12/8: Music You May Have Missed In 2010
• 12/7: Knock-Out Movies of 2010