Sqwink Album Art Blog

The Guillemots are hardly a famed-bunch for fantastic album artwork—take a look at Through the Windowpane for example, but when I saw the design for the single Get Over It (below), I simply gasped. Why? Because, after hearing the track (and incidentaly liking it) I pondered the reason why the CD design was simply a red plastic rope-looking monstrosity with text over the top.

Fuelled by curiosity, I sped to the iTunes Store (er, online that is) to find out more about this seemingly-unthoughtful album art. Then, and what may be obvious by now, I saw the artwork for the Guillemots new album Red (pictured below). Now, this CD design makes no sense to me either, but I could see the reasoning behind the photography used in the Get Over it single.

I’m not sure what this huge red ball sitting in a dark tunnel supposed to be, but I do like it. Let’s face it, that image is both memorable and elegant. I’m kinda into the Guillemots anyway, so I have a fair idea of what they’re all about—and this album art certainly ‘fits the bill’.

On a negative note, though, I don’t like the Guillemots logo. It’s just terrible, drab and uninspiring, for me anyway. I’m unsure of what it may be representing, nor the reason why it has survived previous album releases and re-surfaced for Red.

Be all this as it may, I think this artwork is fitting for band’s music that it represents. At the beginning of this post I was ranting on about the single taken from it when viewed out of context. Now I have seen the big picture, I have upgraded my opinion of Get Over It from ‘what is this supposed to be’, to ‘clever concept, but only works as part of a whole’. Overall, I rate the CD single design 4/10, but the album 7/10. Any comments, feel free to leave one…

I’ve discovered recently that not everyone knows about the itunes free download. Yep, it costs nothing. The most useful music program, available for Mac and PC is available to download online at Apple!

I use it on a daily basis and would recommend it to anyone, seriously. For me, apart from [obviously] listening to my music, I like to keep track of new music album releases so I can review them here on my blog. We’re bearly onto version 8 of itunes at the moment, so it’s a program with most of the bugs sorted out. That’s it for this post, I just want you to know that it’s available for nothing (like 99% of you do)…

Yeah, this is a rather mixed-up title for a kind of strange review…well, more like an album art face-off. The image below shows the new Get Cape Wear Cape Fly CD Cover for Searching for the Hows and Whys.

Hmmm, weird, yes—but I’ve seen something similar before. The album Voices of Animals and Men by The Young Knives has very similar charactaristics, such as the typographic placement and ‘hollow’ photography (below).

So, I’m thinking, is the album art for Searching for the Hows and Whys a direct inspiration from the Young Knives sleeve? I don’t know. If anyone has an insight on this, please leave a comment.

As a side-note, I do like both of these designs—both just ooze with an alternative-music vibe, and even though they’ve been professionally designed, they also look amateurish—as part of the styling.

Like I said, this isn’t really a review, more of an observation of two similarly-styled CD Covers. While i’m on the subject of The Young Knives, you may want to read my review of the artwork for their single Terra Firma.