Sqwink Album Art Blog

R.E.M’s new single, Supernatural Superserious, is taken from their 14th studio album, Accelerate—which incidentally has great album art. However, the sleeve for the first single to be plucked from the album is rather uninspiring (see below).

Firstly, I don’t know what it actually is - apart from the typography, obviously. Secondly, with the Accelerate being so good (look out for my future posts)…why is this a shambles?
To give this piece of album art 4/10 is a gift. It’s not totally rubbish, but being a sleeve for R.E.M—it could have been so much better. It may be supernatural, it may be Superserious…but it’s definitely not Sleevealicious!

I’m used to hearing a new Hot Chip track—and then at some point discovering the album artwork which represents it. These CD covers, such as Hot Chip’s The Warning, Colours and Over and Over are both bright and colorful. These covers are what I’m used to seeing—and what I imagine their work would look like in future releases.

Now, with the release of Hot Chip’s new album Made in the Dark, these connotations of what the cover-style is expected to be like are blown away (see above).

In a nutshell, I think this album artwork is both bland and dull—but still quite imaginative in a very niched-sort-of-way. Don’t get me wrong, just because Hot Chips’ previous albums have been colorful doesn’t mean they have to stick to that style forever, I just think that in this case, they should’ve done.

Overall, the real question is—Does this album art represent Hot Chip’s music and style…well yes. It may be bland and may be boring, but it is different, it is unique and is recognizable as a Hot Chip CD cover. At the end of the day, that is what sleeve’s are all about—selling the music.

So has the designer put a lot of thought into this design? Yes. Could it have been better? Yes. Was it made in the dark? Er, you tell me!

This is going to be one of my shorter posts—well, more of a rant really. Every time I look on the front page of iTunes lately, I see a photo-shot of Adele, and now, her new album artwork for 19.

I’m not a fan of her music, but I reckon the Home Town single is quite good—however, this is about the sleeve (below).

I don’t have a problem at all with this cover, it’s just so boring and typical of British sleeves of the present. It is important for an upcoming star like Adele to have her face out there I suppose, but what I get annoyed with is the ‘if the face fits’ syndrome—where only the aesthetically pleasing photos make it onto CD artwork. There’s a lot of this going on in the music scene, just like it also has.

What’s my point you may ask? This album sleeve is just yet another (and uninspiring) example of how human aesthetics has been used to promote music. What if Adele was a faceless-trout-looking-ogre, but just as talented; you wouldn’t see a spotty, cold-sore covered face on the artwork would you? Well, not at least in this pop-culture.

As is, this very commonly-themed album art (albeit professionally-executed) is purposeful, yet unoriginal—and it’s like 19 Album Covers I’ve seen this week…there!