MY 50 Favorite Rock Album Covers: #26 to 30

This is Part Five in my series listing my 50 Favorite Rock Album Covers of All Time.  This group of five, Numbers 26 to 30, is a pretty unique grouping.  It features two simple, cartoon-like drawings of figures, two artist photos (see what I said about that regarding Some Girls’ Feel It cover at #39 in Part Three), and one photo with no people or figures whatsoever.  Here we go.

Oh, as I’ve said in every post of this list, if you have a favorite album cover or two you’d like to share, please post it/them in the comments on the blog here, on my Facebook page facebook.com/collindanielsfanpage, or Tweet it to me @collindaniels.

#30: Hole – Celebrity Skin

I imagine it must be difficult to make a world-famous, major label rock band look dangerous and threatening, but not so dangerous and threatening that stores start refusing to carry their new album.  This cover seems to walk that line perfectly.  The black and white photography, the large, ambiguous object on fire behind them, and the looks on the faces  of each of the band members here (is it burning rage or hardened ambivalence?) all come together to make me want to listen.  

#29: Rival Schools – United by Fate

This cover proves you can draw the observer into a cover…by getting rid of the people’s faces entirely!  I may be imagining it, but thanks to writing about each of the entries so far, I see a possible influence from Blondie’s Parallel Lines cover on this one.  One particular interesting shade of green, a big circle, two oppositely-gendered-yet-information-less figures, and an oddly-spaced set of horizontal lines.  Simplicity and limitation yield an elegant kind of brilliance.  

#28: Kasabian (Self-Titled)

An example here of the band name encased in a particular logo featuring prominently.  Seems a solid choice for its self-titled nature.  The head of the figure here has one eye more than both occupants of the United by Fate cover, and what an eye it is.  Haunting, mysterious.  The figure asserts potential danger with its possible-terrorist-in-action head covering, not exactly a note many artists would be interested to strike in the West after 9/11.  

#27: Julianna Hatfield – Hey Babe

This is the second cover on the list featuring a photo of Julianna herself – the other, again, being #39 with one of her bands, Some Girls.  Incidentally, her much-later solo album Made in China did not make the Top 50 but came damn close.  She seems to appear on most of her covers, not sure if that’s her personal preference or that of whoever designs them.  I can’t exactly put my finger on why I love this one so much – something about the bizarre angle of the shot, the lone strand of hair crossing her lips, the monk-like hands with interlocked fingers.

#26: The Damn Lovelys – Trouble Creek

Perhaps the only entry for a Southern Rock/Country Rock band on the list.  This is just a beautiful, simple shot, seemingly looking a bit behind, out a car window, on a road somewhere in America, at dusk.  It could be a lot of places, I guess – Connecticut, Indiana, even Wyoming maybe.  But it reminds me of how the sky looked so many times at that time of day-meets-night, in the area of southern Maine and New Hampshire where I grew up.

Coming soon, Numbers 21 to 25, which will have some of the most visually-interesting and eye-popping covers yet on the list.

Remember, if you have a favorite album cover or two you’d like to share, please post it/them in the comments on the blog here, on my Facebook page facebook.com/collindanielsfanpage, or Tweet it/them to me @collindaniels.

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My 50 Favorite Rock Album Covers: #31 to 35

This is Part Four in my series listing my 50 Favorite Rock Album Covers of All Time.  This group of five, Numbers 31 to 35, includes a ray gun (well, a disintegrator gun, to be exact), an exploding car jump, and a giant musician, with a giant guitar, wearing a giant scarf.  Let’s get right into it, shall we?

If you have a favorite album cover or two you’d like to share, please post it/them in the comments on the blog here, on my Facebook page facebook.com/collindanielsfanpage, or Tweet it to me @collindaniels.

Collin's 50 Favorite Rock Album Covers of All Time

#35: Foo Fighters (Self-Titled)

Who would have thought something so positive and wonderful could have come out of the suicide or one of rock’s all-time greatest, Kurt Cobain?  The post-Nirvana journey of  Dave Grohl and his band Foo Fighters is honestly one of the best things to come out of a suicide, ever.  Foo fans know this, but drummer-turned-guitarist-singer-and-frontman Grohl wrote and recorded this entire debut album by himself, and apparently only intended it for friends and never for any sort of wide release.  There was no band, there were no Foo Fighters.

The lone image of a Science-Fiction Disintegrator Pistol from the old Buck Rogers TV show could have a host of different meanings.  To me, it represents what Grohl eventually did, after the most famous band in the world at the time was literally gone in a flash.  Yeah, some really awful shit just happened.  Nothing we do is gonna make that go away.  But now, let’s have some fun, and let’s fuckin’ ROCK.

#34: Blondie – Parallel Lines

This band was once one of the hippest things to come out of the punk rock scene.  Then, all of a sudden, they were one of the hippest things in the Disco scene.  Before, during, and after all of that, somehow, they remained extremely cool.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like you gotta be hardcore NYC to pull anything like that off successfully.  If students at the Fashion Institute of Technology haven’t been studying this cover for years, well…they should have been.  It’s also further proof for me of that adage that in Art, limits and constraints can breed the best creative ideas.  Black, white, up-and-down lines…voila.

#33: Gerry Rafferty – City to City

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…A GIANT GERRY RAFFERTY!  I’m amazed sometimes at how great works of art seem like if they were just an inch or an ounce less brilliant, they’d be…well, crap.  At first glance, this cover might look like a supremely cheesy example of early 1970’s American art, that centered around the Hippie culture concepts of peace, love and um…being on drugs.

But there’s something about it that knocks me into a happy place when I look at it.  I try not to let the music on the album itself influence this list too much, but I suppose one of the things that can make a cover great IS its connection to the music.  This album has always sounded to me like the masterpiece of one of the greatest rock songwriters ever, but created with a gentleness and humility that belies its underlying strength and power. 

So the fact that we have this laid-back, easy-going, 1970’s dude with a guitar and sunglasses, BUT he’s as big as a skyscraper, and could be coming to crush your whole town Godzilla-style, just feels right to me.

#32: Barbara Manning – One Perfect Green Blanket

It took a little-known female indie rock artist from the early 1990’s to put a gorgeous painting of a fully-populated, vintage baseball field, with players in action, on an album cover.  For this, and this alone, she makes the list.  I remain surprised that somebody else…CCR, John Cougar Mellencamp, SOMEBODY, didn’t do it first.  And that as far as I know, no one else has done it since.  

#31: The Subways – All or Nothing

Speaking of “How is it that no one has done this before?  HOW???” Here we have…an orange, 1970’s model American sedan, doing a jump off a ramp, caught in mid-air, exploding, on fire, with an additional and completely unnecessary fireball underneath it.  My inner 15-year-old-boy pretty much wants every album cover I ever do from now on to look something like this.  Did I mention it is EXPLODING AND ON FIRE??? Brilliant.

Coming soon, Numbers 36 to 40, which will include exactly zero cars exploding in mid-air, zero ray guns, and zero paintings of baseball fields.

Remember, if you have a favorite album cover or two you’d like to share, please post it/them in the comments on the blog here, on my Facebook page facebook.com/collindanielsfanpage, or Tweet it/them to me @collindaniels.

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My 50 Favorite Rock Album Covers: #36-40

This is Part Three of my list of my favorite rock album covers of all time.  I didn’t get any submissions of YOUR favorites that I know of when I posted Part Two, so allow me to reiterate.  I am interested in your favorites, too! So feel free to post here in the comments on the blog, or on Facebook at facebook.com/collindanielsfanpage, or on Twitter @collindaniels.

So here is the second grouping on the list, starting with #40 and going on up to #36.

Collin’s Favorite 50 Rock Album Covers of All Time

#40: Duran Duran – Rio 

If this cover were a painting that was hanging in a museum, I believe it could be accurately titled The 1980’s. I won’t go into it here, but if you Google this sucker, the story of the artist Patrick Nagel is interesting.

#39: Some Girls – Feel It

Somewhere in one of the “How to Be a Professional Rock Musician” books I read years back, one of the tips was: don’t put a photo of the band on the album cover.  The thinking here being: a potential fan who is unfamiliar with the band could like the music, but not like what the bands looks like.  The logic was, get someone to like the album, then they’ll be more likely to like what you look like afterward.   Lead with the photo, and the looks could turn people off.  Maybe this doesn’t apply once you’ve really hit the big-time?  In any case, tons of bands and musicians go the other way from that recommendation, and to my surprise, a lot of the covers on my list here feature a photo of the band or artist.  This one has one of the coolest photos of three kickass indie rock ladies, including the best-known of them, former Blake Babies and Lemonheads member, and solo artist in her own right, Julianna Hatfield (in center).

#38: ABBA – Arrival

Yes, an ABBA cover made my list!  Come on, it’s a crystal-clear photo of all four pop-star Swedes, squished into the giant-glass-bubble cockpit of a helicopter, that looks like the ones they used on the TV show M*A*S*H, in what looks like the middle of an Iowa cornfield.  How could it not be a fave? Seriously.

#37: Afterdawn – Break 

This NYC-based alt-metal-esque quartet broke up in 2009, but they are still one of my Top 5 favorite bands of all time.  Lyricist and lead singer Corynne Wilder is also an incredibly talented visual artist.  Her fliers for their shows shocked me with their brilliance and unique creative spark, often featuring fantastical characters that could have stepped into almost any Tim Burton movie and stolen the show.  This cover for one of the group’s two EPs features a nightmarish, perhaps partly-Wizard of Oz-inspired tree, that looks like it’s ready to produce a thousand poison apples, strangle a horde of unsuspecting forest-walkers, or both.

#36: Band of Susans – Veil

A) Purple is my favorite color
B) This cover – to me – perfectly matches the sound that you hear on the record
C) The sound on the record is AWESOME, which means, so is the cover
D) Purple is my favorite color

Next time: #31 to #35, y’all!

Have a favorite rock album cover or two of your own?  We wanna see!  Share it with me and your fellow readers in the comments below, on Facebook at facebook.com/collindanielsfanpage, or on Twitter @collindaniels.

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My 50 Favorite Rock Album Covers: #41-45

This is Part Two of my list of my favorite rock album covers of all time.  Before I get back into my list, I want to thank the two fans/friends so far who have let me know some of their own favorite album covers. Patrick Myers of Sebec, Maine chimed in with one of his, the not-so-tame cover of Herb Albert's Whip Cream and Other Delights.  

Tammy Michniuk of San Diego gave me over 100 of her favorites, including Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Blind Faith's self-titled album, The Grateful Dead's Anthem of the Sun, Nevermind by Nirvana (which quite curiously does not make my Top 50 list), both the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street and Some Girls, Supertramp's Breakfast in America (which just missed my list), and every single album cover designed by artist Roger Dean, who designed over 100 covers himself.  

Curiously enough, according to Wikipedia, Dean designed no fewer than 24 album covers for Yes, but DID NOT design the cover of theirs that made my list, for 90125.  That cover, as Dave Nicholson of Saco, Maine correctly points out, was designed in 1983 by Garry Mouat on an Apple IIe computer.  Steve Jobs even helped make awesome Yes album covers.  Whaddaya know.

Huge thanks to Patrick, Tammy and Dave for your awesome contributions.

I said this in Part One, but to remain clear on it:  I am not claiming that this is some objectively-determined list.  This is purely from me, thinking back from my childhood all the way to today.  They’re the ones I, Collin, like the best.  That’s it.

So here is the second grouping on the list, starting with #45 and going on up to #41.

Collin’s Favorite 50 Rock Album Covers of All Time

#45: Hybrasil – The Kicker

Christian McNeill is an insanely talented Irish dude who formed the alt-rock band Schtum in the 1990’s. Schtum had one hit off that album on alt-rock radio, “Skydiver.” After a while Christian moved to Boston and formed the band Hybrasil.  The Kicker was their second, and I believe, final, LP.  Last I heard, Christian was with a band called Christian McNeill & The Seamonsters, still kicking around Beantown.  This cover is based off a photo of the frontman himself.  I just love the style and colors.  Looks as cool as this record sounds.

#44: Carol King – Tapestry

One of the earliest covers on my list, this is one of the many albums my dad played constantly when I was a little kid.  As a songwriter, I feel like Carol King is to me like Mother Mary is to devout Catholics.  She’s hands-down one of the best rock songwriters, ever.  I love this cover because it has always made me feel like I know her a little bit, like she’s welcomed me into her apartment for a private little concert.  The 1970’s feel is also unmistakable, and here, that is a very good thing.

#43: The White Stripes – Get Behind Me Satan

Jack and Meg White are each pretty cool in their own right, but together as The White Stripes they are one of the coolest things on the planet.  Their entire look as a band has been crystal-clear since they burst upon us, and it matches their unique sound perfectly.  This cover is my favorite of theirs.  It just radiates Cool.

 #42: Gruntruck – Inside Yours

I could – and probably should, someday – write a whole blog about the little-remembered 90’s Seattle band Gruntruck.  The most important thing is that their band name is super-fun to say, especially if you say it while actually grunting.  

They are one of the few bands that made it to some –albeit brief – national exposure that I had the privilege to meet in person for more than a fleeting moment.  They are also the only band – as far as I can remember – that invited me on to their tour bus after the show, a thrill I still think about all the time.

I assume the visual on the cover is in part a digitized photo of frontman Ben McMillan, who sadly died quite young of natural causes a few years ago.  Along with the band name in bold white letters set against a black background, it gives me the exact feel of this record, the first of their two LP’s: loud, raunchy, unapologetically abrasive and totally awesome.

#41: Fleetwood Mac - Rumours

I forget which famous stand-up comedian it was, but one once said, “If you were a white, middle-class American family in the 1980’s, you were issued a copy of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.”  This cover has made the Top 5 or Top 10 of every “Best Rock Album Covers” lists I could find online.  For good reason: it’s stunningly beautiful, timeless, and evokes a range of emotions in one glance.

It’s always been interesting to me that the two actual band members posing are drummer Mick Fleetwood and singer Stevie Nicks.  If you’ve ever seen them in concert or watched a video of them live, you know that regardless of who may have driven the songwriting in this band, these two are the most likely to have been Theater Majors, had not devoted their lives to music.

Next time: #36 to #40, of course!

Have a favorite album cover or two of your own?  Tell me in the comments!

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