John Foster takes music packaging very seriously. He has deconstructed the design of the recording industry through his personal work and his books, Maximum Page Design (HOW), New Masters of Poster Design (Rockport) and the upcoming For Sale: Innovative Solutions in Packaging Design (HOW) as well as a monograph of Sub Pop’s Art Director, Jeff Kleinsmith, slated for publication by the label in 2008.
He will be poking and prodding various albums on a weekly basis so please be sure to keep an eye out!
This week’s victims:
Blonde Redhead “23”
Is it worth listening to no matter what it looks like? A cry went out from the Blonde Redhead faithful when this record was released as they felt it was too commercial and dare I say accessible; but following on the heels of their work with Guy Picciotto (that’s right – Fugazi’s Guy) on “Misery Is A Butterfly,” the transition seemed obvious. The listening public is certainly the beneficiary of the additional studio and songwriting polish as the band recorded and produced the disc on their own (although you can hear Alan Moulder turning the knobs and pushing the faders in the mix.) Leading off with the driving title track, as Kazu Makino’s voice doubles and triples the melodic lines, the Brothers Pace color the proceedings with torrents of drumming and astonishingly simple keyboard parts. To say that they have grown out of their noisy beginnings is an understatement as they provide pop gems like “Spring and by Summer Fall.” The end result is a beguiling blend of shoegazing tension mixed with the pop sense of a Depeche Mode and the arty blend not heard since The Yeah Yeah Yeahs stunned me with “Maps.”
Credit: “Creative Direction: Alexander Gelman, Art Direction: David Heasty, Art: Alex Gross.”
Any signs of creative interference in the design process by the artist? I can’t say who saw the original painting of the four-legged woman by artist Alex Gross but it suits all of their sensibilities, as does his link to Japanese culture. (This painting has been mistakenly referred to as being lifted from old carnival art but it is modern.)
Does the look fit the sound? Perfectly. It is the first record they have really combined the visual with the music inside. The feminine quality, yet not too girly and accessible yet undeniably strange says it all. Alexander Gelman’s work has been covered before in my Maximum Page Design book so I won’t go on forever (stop laughing at the inevitable two fingered punching of the keyboard that continues) but his work as designmachine has been nothing short of innovative. His philosophy of “subtraction” has moved his work closer to the art world than design. The basic gist is starting out with the normal compliment of visual tools at your disposal – image, type, color, photos, copy etc… Now you start to strip away everything you do not need to get your message across. The number of items that go by the wayside instantly is eye opening. Then you evaluate what you have left. This is the tricky part. Now you subtract even further. Need some type? Simplify it. Need an image? Can’t it just be the basic shape? This goes on until you can take it no further. It is exhausting yet terribly rewarding (and courageous in this age of information overload.) To show his dedication to the process, Gelman has even “subtracted” his hair.
The reason I raise it is that the part of the package that truly makes it for me is the embossing on the art. An emboss is typically just a production bell and whistle and would be the sort of thing I would expect to see lost in the first wave of a “subtraction” session. That it was chosen to stay, and not by accident as there is virtually nothing else on the package, says everything about the perfect execution.
That does bring me to my one knock on the design. I like a little functionality in my record packaging. Having only partial credits and tracklisting on the disc itself is more annoying than helpful and makes me want to rush this into my itunes so I know the name of what I am listening to. Sort of defeats the purpose of such an impressive wrapper.
You can see if the band brings the same care to their songs as they did to the cover (I know they will) tonight (Jan 16th) at the 9:30 Club.
Final score (out of 10): 8.0
God loves a cheerful giver.
Nice work, John Foster. I'll be seeing you tonight.
I asked Amedeo about it in my interview, this is what he said:
BYT: Ahem, so can you tell me about the cover art for the new album.
AP: It’s an old photo of these people standing in front of a big circus poster that Kazu found in a book , I think it’s from the early 1900’s. And the poster has this woman with four legs and a tennis racket and it says “She Really Existed”, it was some sort of freakshow poster.
BYT: So you guys just liked the image?
AP: Yeah, we liked it –
The reception goes bad, and the call is disconnected. I re-dial… read more:
Yeah - I had seen that and heard it elsewhere but they must have fed the image to the artist or connected his piece with the old poster as this is a painting Ross produced in 2007.