Judging A Cover By Its Cover: Patton Oswalt “Werewolves and Lollipops”
October 21, 2009 by John Foster
Volume Please: It’s not every week that I can legitimately deviate from the musical analysis so integral to this column – then again, it’s not every week that we put on a full honkin’ comedy festival to tickle every last one of your little ribbies! Enter local boy made good Patton Oswalt to headline one of our evenings of jollies and find himself subjected to the rusty cleaver of Judging. Before we begin, I should come clean with the fact that Patton once rejected a poster I designed for him because it made fun of his height. He claimed that the style was “too eighties,” but we both know the dirty little truth.
I have long been a fan and have seen Mr. Oswalt live within the past year – so recommending him takes very little effort. The guy is heelarious and age has only sharpened that wit.
Reviewing a comedy record is pretty tough though – it is either funny or it isn’t. Patton is funny (period.)
The record starts with “America Has Spoken” – his piss your pants take on KFC’s Famous Bowls that still manages to sneak in a This Mortal Coil reference. Is this tailor made for me? “I don’t want to waste those precious calories chewing” in song form? I do believe it is. “This is a layer of courtesy fat.” C’mon. It actually only gets funnier, and darker, and funnier.
Track 13 is “Sterling, Virginia.”
It makes an argument for Phil Collins as a troubled dark rocker and then segues into “…The Gatekeepers of Coolness” trashing DC’s talking mustache Arch Campbell.
Say no more funnyman!
(Completely random note: the record is mixed by Dave Barbe – yes, Dave Barbe of Sugar bass player fame.)
Patton is a “present from God.” We get it. What’s the sucka look like? This record brings together so many of my favorite creative forces that my head nearly explodes (or is it transforms into a giant mouth and tries to consume a smaller version of my nervous little expression?) From the title: “Werewolves and Lollipops” to the retro color palette and the illustrative genius of Zeloot to the design work of Jeff Kleinsmith – everything is in place for something far more challenging in comparison to the standard mugshot comedy album cover – and boy do they deliver!
To properly place how big a priority creating a cutting edge package was for the crew, it is important to note that Oswalt was starring as the main voice in the number one movie in America at the time this came out AND you couldn’t see his face and had to really work to read his name on the cover. Crazy? Certainly. Amazing? Yes!
Kleinsmith lets Zeloot run wild and gets the results most can only dream about with graphic, yet bizarre, imagery. Her whacked out work has been watched closely by the design underground – as it trickles over from the Netherlands, but the reality is that her mixture of nightmarish twists on the Push Pin aesthetic is the kind of illustration you admire and possibly collect – but never have an appropriate client for. Even at a place like Sub Pop, Kleinsmith would have been hard-pressed to unleash her bizarre concoctions on one of their bands. Luckily he found a willing deviant in Oswalt and producer Henry Owings.
It is not just the illustrations that carry out the quirky joys of the package, but rather the handmade typography mixing flowing cursive globs to form his name and perspective altering blocks to make out the title. Inside, Ryan Russell’s photos are layered over with the illustrations to fun effect and left more or less alone as they grace the booklet. Zeloot has even more treats for our eyes as we dig further and one of my favorites – naked legs emerging from a mouth/blanket – lurks on the back of the booklet.
Repurposing the type and face drawing for the discs makes for a pleasant double barrel burst when you flip through the digipak. I can hardly get enough of the perfectly captured pensive Patton.
One of the only things I might have changed is that I prefer the back image of the illustrated Oswalt, sitting with a tense expression in an easy chair while his faceglobe rests on his perspiring tongue (god I hope that is sweat…) as a cover to the more manic fanged gobble about to take place that is there. Small quibble on the pathway to magic and funny in the end.
Now let’s all go make mute and invisible babies and name them “Ten Hours of Sleep A Night.”
Keeping Score Are You? Funnymeter 9.0 Magicdesignmeter 9.0
John Foster owns his very own design firm, Bad People Good Things and has a brand new book out! Dirty Fingernails (Rockport). He also is the author of For Sale: Over 200 Innovative Solutions in Packaging Design (HOW), New Masters of Poster Design (Rockport), Maximum Page Design (HOW) and a monograph on Jeff Kleinsmith for Sub Pop Records
word.
patton + zeloot + Kleinsmith = top friggin notch.
October 21, 2009 at 2:28 pm