Category Cover Art
70 FROM ’70 — THE TOP TEN — #3
3. MILES DAVIS — BITCHES BREW It shimmers, it growls. It moans and howls. There is glowing radiance and dirty work. With this double album—sometimes mesmerising and occasionally jolting—Miles Davis changed both jazz and popular music. Having done cool, modal and progressive (all that restlessness!), Miles and producer Teo Macero engineered this vast work from […]
70 FROM ’70—PART 2
20 VAROUS—Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack & More It is sprawling, patchy, frustrating, and incomplete yet the soundtrack to the film of the event of the decade (the 60s, that is) is essential. Held in August 1969 on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm just outside of the small town of Woodstock, the actual name of […]
INCOMING [WINTER 2019 EDITION]
Having enjoyed a couple of recent posts where fellow music nuts share the, er, nuts they have gathered, I thought I’d join the party. Don’t know how it is in your neighbourhood, but in these parts the price of second-hand records has become so absurd that it is often better value buying new re-issues. Seems […]
TOMORROW AND TOMORROW
Prior to 2017’s Tomorrow Forever, the last Matthew Sweet album of original material was 2011’s Modern Art. In between was the third volume of Under The Covers, the charming series recorded by Sweet and ex-Bangle Susanna Hoffs. Matthew Sweet’s personal circumstances had changed considerably in the intervening years: he re-located away from Los Angeles to […]
YES, MR WILSON
After my first listens to Steven Wilson’s remixes of five core seventies albums from the Yes catalogue, I confess I was ambivalent. It was not easy to pin down what was preventing a full-hearted embracing of Mr Wilson’s work. Perhaps it was simply different, and I was uncomfortable with the changes to sounds I’ve enjoyed […]
VERTICAL VOYEUR
This next instalment in the ‘vertical gatefold’ series brings together a varied collection of LP covers that feature, um, bodies. A progression from Buffalo’s body parts, you might say, though each is a little challenging or even risqué in its own way. First up is a double album of the Velvet Underground recorded live in […]
ERUPTION DOWNUNDER
As has been related elsewhere, I met Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep and assorted seventies noise-makers in Rod Amberton’s bedroom. I also encountered a band less well-known outside these sunburned shores: the hard riffing Sydney band, Buffalo. Buffalo’s first two albums were popular amongst teenage boys of a certain age, and although I managed to find […]
VERTICAL PURPLE
The quest to unearth further 60s vertical gatefold album covers produced many nominations of 70s covers that do indeed open up in ‘portrait’ format, but only one addition from Sixties-land. The LP was the third Deep Purple release, their self-titled record from 1969. Many thanks to Arterrorist for the reminder. I say that because the CD […]
VERTICAL HOLD
There are plenty of books on album cover art on the Vinyl Connection bookshelves, but none of them could tell me which record had the glory of being the first gatefold pop/rock album. Everyone knows Sgt Pepper was the first LP to have the song lyrics on the cover—the back, incidentally, not inside in the […]
ANOTHER DAYBREAK
In a recent post, blog friend JDB of Augenblick introduced the famous Maxfield Parrish painting ‘Daybreak’ and we looked at a 1984 record by Dali’s Car that borrowed it for the cover. Here are two further eighties album covers inspired by Parrish’s iconic painting. BOBBY WOMACK — SO MANY RIVERS [1985] Bobby Womack was a […]
