As music has firmly embraced digital formats, it is easy to imagine album covers and CD booklets to have gone the way of the dinosaur and to now exist as artifacts from another era, relics from a time when a near fetishism revolved around the purchasing of physical objects holding our favorite songs and when artists took the time to bedeck album covers with images worthy of the honor. What I think is somewhat surprising, then, is the strength of album artwork in the digital age, when cover artwork may exist as little more than an icon on the side of your iTunes (that is, if you purchased the album legitimately or took the time to import the cover art). The question, then, is what motivation is there for music artists to invest in album artwork that is perhaps glanced at once when purchasing an album?
If you are an avid music blog reader, or happened to catch Georges Condo’s profile in the January 17th New Yorker, you may know that Kanye West (though I am loathe to write anything about him) commissioned Condo to paint his cover art for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Condo actually produced nine variations), and if you know anything about Condo, this probably cost in the million dollar range. Surely, as always and much to his delight, Kanye is an exception, but his sort of extravagance does beg the question whether in ten years, when physical music formats exist solely as novelties for collectors, anything on this scale could happen. I don’t believe it will.
But that does not mean we have seen the end of great album artwork. I would like to point out two album covers that I think are deserving of attention, both painted by French artist Fursy Teyssier, notable for his other-worldly style and expert use of the color blue. The first is one that has appeared on rocknyc a few times, Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit, the cover of which depicts a beautiful and haunting watercolor of a creek. The second is the cover of Alcest’s Ecailles de Lune, which portrays a netherworldly underwater scene of a sleeping man and a mermaid.
I hope we continue to see album artwork like this. While the environmental benefits of eliminating physical packaging for music will be enormous, I hope that it will not come at the expense of stimulating album artwork.
I didn’t dive into photography as an album cover option and only offered these examples due to the ubiquity of Kanye and his unique album cover and the fact that I’m on a huge Alcest and Agalloch kick. I would love to hear any album covers released recently that anyone else finds particularly commendable and any thoughts on the future of album artwork.