Going into this actual year that's coming to an end, it's time to start celebrating what I consider was best in different categories. The first of them will be related to the covers that are shown in both physical and digital releases.
Some say that art first enters throughout the eyes and I certainly agree: there were a lot of instances where I clicked on an album just because I was feeling rather curious of its album cover. Some are mysterious, some are awe-inspiring, some are weird and awkward yet irresistible, some are true works of art, and some are just perfectly placed and neated and composed. Whatever the case, the front cover can say a lot about what's on the inside.
It's an interesting list I came out to create, since this departs a bit from the auditory sense that holds this blog together and favours the visual aspects of musicality. Behind the pictures, I will write a short explanation telling why each piece moved something inside me, and why I cannot wait to have them all locked onto my bedroom walls. Let me start.
1. Tim Hecker - Konoyo
All these months and I still can't figure out what the artist meant with such an absurd image: you can see a piano set on fire, parts of a car's engine being shot at or swam into, a dead-end suburb street and some apparently terribly organised Photoshop objects that don't make any single sense. And besides that, here it's my favourite album cover of the year. Art needs to strike you to impact you, and this revolved my stomach and mind like no other.
2. Idles - Joy As An Act Of Resistance.
The British post-punk group has thrown an old picture of a wedding celebration to make their point: are they cheering and dancing? Are they fighting and enjoying it? Why are they all white? What the hell is going on? Plus, the glittered and old-fashioned JOY in the corner. As they say, whether we laugh or cry, we cry laughing! We're all scum! And the more we embrace it, the thicker it will stick.
3. Rosalía - El Mal Querer
The Spanish singer and producer has given us the best album of the decade, and her artistry is even more elevated because she accompanies her immaculate music with imagery that's as striking. The album cover here is iconic, as if she was an angel coming down from the heavens, all in white and golden. There are tons of symbolisms behind it, and that's enough excuse to honour and praise the exhibit.
4. Yves Tumor - Safe In The Hands Of Love
Yves Tumor drenches into hypnagogic experimental pop and shows us his most horrifying demons throughout the album cover. It feels creepy, weird, even disgusting to look at, and yet it's phenomenally addictive. Bad taste can be so bad it can be transformed into post-goodness, and the avant-garde necessarily has to go through the ridiculous stage of self-shame to coronate its meaning. Here's an example.
5. Metric - Art Of Doubt
The experienced dream pop/rock band comes with an album cover that's as minimal and simple as tracklingly engrossing. The line that seems to be aiming at tracing a circle does it with such impresition that it becomes obsolete and crisp clear. Empty as it gets, the big void that's left in the middle turns out to be a terrifying reality and an abyss of thoughts and intentions that only music may fill up until being safe.
6. Parquet Courts - Wide Awake!
The post-punk outfit has always presented their iconoclastic approach to music with vivid imagery and their latest record is definitely no exception. The three headless people dancing around the moving square do that with such careless improvisation that it's clear to say the band knows we're all doomed as hell, but we can escape the torture by fighting back and giving our best while still alive.
7. Vessel - Queen Of Golden Dogs
The mysterious British electronic producer turns baroque in his latest record, and he seems to dwelve into medieval imagery to pronounce his message. The picture is as mesmerising as nerve-wracking, and the interaction between the young maid with the anthropomorphous hall that contains birds and threads retells melancholy, desperation and inevitable suffering. Look at her expression: there's passive life there, but behind the layers there might be soul.
8. Daughters - You Won't Get What You Want
The most apocalyptic and densely engrossing record of the year feels penetrating in vision, too. The scary face that's shown seems like the one you're likely to have in your darkest and worst nightmares; the expression of depression, extreme solitude and angry horror. It's a simple, almost-cavernous trace that can lead to unexpected places in the psyche and turn your head around to check you're surely alone in the bedroom.
9. Earl Sweatshirt - Some Rap Songs
As with Yves Tumor, Earl goes fully experimental and abstract on his latest record. He literally seems to dig up his own mind in order to interact with his darkest ghosts and shadiest thoughts, and a person this confused, this unstable and this willing to go to the subconscious might look like the picture above. Again, bad taste is relative, and sometimes emotions are expressed through truly curious means.
10. Jlin - Autobiography (Music From Wayne McGregor's Autobiography)
The acclaimed coreographer and dancer Wayne McGregor recruited the prolific footwork producer Jlin to score the music for his autobiography and, judging from its cover, she was completely able to express the artist's life as well as her own approach to music in a picture: hyper-kinetic and complex elaborations on movement and synergy seem to connect into a space where the everything becomes the nothing and the nothing is everywhere.
11. Dead Can Dance - Dionysus
After years of silence, the Australian/British outfit returns with pieces of ambient tribalism that mingle on Eastern European and neo-Bizantine chants and melodies to concoct ethereal and menacing voids. The album cover reflects a typical mask from a Mexican people and it possesses such level of detail and colour that it's hard to see the profound sadness and mystery in the eyes. This is just how trapped you get while listening to it.
12. Valdes - Gris
The Córdoba-based indie pop band Valdes came out with one of the most perplexing releases of the year, and the greatness amplifies while looking at its unsettling, heavily iconic album cover. A human figure dressed in navy blue holds a mirror where another one's being lighted upon; the curious thing comes when you see that none of their faces or heads are shown, but instead replaced with big dots. Cryptic and sensational as the music itself.
13. Blood Orange - Negro Swan
The newest release from the wonderful producer Devonté Hynes is a fantastic exploration into black modernity and youth, and is packed up with sweet, joyous R&B. The cover shows an androgynous person dressed like a white angel sitting on the side of a white car. The contraposition of colours might seem obvious at first, but it's clear the artist saw it necessary to address topics that seem obvious as well, but wouldn't be so in reality.
14. Visigoth - Conqueror's Oath
Metal bands are widely known for their thoroughly design album covers that usually depict glorious rises from the death or beyond the living, or apocalyptic pictures that scare and marvel at equal parts. The latest release from Visigoth seems to fall in the former, showing a victorious and highly furious attitude towards problems in life. And the image is perfectly connected with the music; what else can it be asked for?
15. Anna Von Hausswolff - Dead Magic
The magnetic and maximalist album from the Swedish auteur feels simbiotic with its cover: rotten, raw and creepy at the edge of obscenity. One may look at it and feel the same as if you were looking at a 19th-century lost picture, and the juxtaposition between the infra-red light makes it the more obscure and shady. Anna finds more than one way to destroy our psyches, and music is just the beginning of it.
16. serpentwithfeet - soil
This cryptic, idiosyncratic new voice booms spheres with his melancholic, galactical release, and the picture that serves as presentation is the perfect simplification to his approach to music. Magical to the point of chamanistic and spiritual to the extreme of levitating, the carton-based dress, the castagnas-like handplays and the two moons make up for a rare, cataleptic experience.
17. Ash Koosha - Unnamed
One of the many releases the Iranian electronic producer threw out this year seems utterly mysterious in form and shape, and its album cover does nothing more than amplifying the intrigue. Almost everything in the picture look pristinely white, but the spectrum that touches the top of his head creates an alien, haunting atmosphere that accurately simulates the pieces that one can listen to.
18. Dommengang - Love Jail
The newest album from the American indie rock band Dommengang might look overlooked this year, but its simple, almost mundane cover stroke me for its beautiful composition. Pastel colours mingle into a sunny day, and a palm tree with a monoblock house create the perfect scenario for music made from and for people from the suburbs; people like you and me, people one can easily relate to.
19. Low - Double Negative
The thickest, most absorbing and regurgitating release of the year seems to have nothing to do with this seemingly optimistic cover, with pink background and an unknown piece of plastic that looks like having two big eyes. It's this contradiction what makes the record even more appealing and interesting to analyse at, creating another layer of substance into a record that's mesmerising and pluri-facetic.
20. Chris Corsano / Bill Orcut - Brace Up!
The thirty-minute explosive piece of free improvisation, avant-garde jazz and experimental rock from the duo is a free-willing experience that's relentless and maniac in form and execution. Its cover reflects that austere sense of recklessness with a terribly-made collage in which Corsano the part that may hang all together, Orcutt the mad man and Brace Up! the chaotic result. And we're the crowd experiencing all in the first row.
21. Louta - Enchastre
The Argentinian character Louta is refreshing in all the aspects of his artistry, and the album cover from his latest record couldn't have been the exception. The aesthetics are tinily thought-out and executed, with blue shades illuminating the scene and reinforcing the singer's head and features, and the pins all over his face are the necessary part that reflects his uninhibited, extravagant personality.
22. Sons Of Kemet - Your Queen Is A Reptile
The sophomore release from the British jazz outfit is exhilarating and wholly vivid, but the concept behind it is a fierce recapitulation that pays homage to important female figures throughout history and geographies. The cover shows a couple of them, enlisted in a sort of militaristic position but still holding great traces of humanity, care and tenderness. A sincere testament to woman's force is perfectly captured in the engraving.
23. Snail Mail - Lush
In my opinion, Lush can be the most overrated record of the year, but I can't deny the strong attraction of its cover. The luminous colours are so well-intermingled while the fonds are thin but fulled with personality. Besides, we can see the singer in a kind of numb, awkward position, not looking at the camera and looking lost in time and space. That position reflects the attitude she takes towards the music on her album.
24. Rival Consoles - Persona
The electronic producer under the name Rival Consoles creates an ambitious and robotic micro-universe on his latest release, one where technology and humanity seem to have no borderline. The cover art, on the same line, appears to be expressing this comparison between a livelier and rougher side (the red one [humanity?]) and the starker, stabler one (the black one [technology?]).
25. Alex Anwandter - Latinoamericana
The latest release from the Chilean singer-songwriter and producer fits perfectly into our modern society and its constraints, but it's nonetheless a furious and heavily empowering record about identity and fearlessness. The album cover is pleasant to look because all the elements on it seem in perfect synchrony: the jungly background with the artist's outfit and serious look, without forgetting the wavy fond and the boundary-pushing album title. It's exquisite and rich art in and from all perspectives.
Bonus: Beastmaker - EP.2
It's more than worth-it to check the eight short EPs that the heavy metal band has modestly threw out this year to see just how adventurous and inviting their music is. And, if that's not enough, all the covers are breath-takingly ugly. In particular, I got lost on their second chapter and its mysterious, creepling characters, as well as with the terrorific purple, grey and black that simulate an old-school horror comic book.
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