Top 10 Favorite Album Covers: 10-7

Alright, so here's my first installment of my top 10 album covers of all time, from 10 to 7 - the top 3 are coming tomorrow.

10. Sonny Rollins - Way Out West. No comment.

9. Caetano Veloso - Caetano Veloso. There's something about this photo - I love the slight blurriness of the picture, especially the background, combined with an almost haziness you get. Then there's that fur thing Veloso's clutching or wearing, you're not really sure - all topped with the look on Veloso's face.

8. John Coltrane - Ascension. That look in Coltrane's eyes is what made him a Saint in the African Orthodox Saint John Coltrane Church in San Francisco. Contrast the calm of Trane and the actual music inside, and you have a great album cover.

7. Pere Ubu - The Modern Dance. I'm not sure why I like this one so much - you kind of have to listen to the album to kind of put the two together - not that you suddenly realize the "meaning" of the album cover once you listen to it, but they just naturally seem to go together. Just looking at it, you know that this is going album is going to be great, even if you have no idea what it sounds like.

6. Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food. Artists only.

5. The Band - Music From Big Pink. The cover was actually painted by Bob Dylan, and it looks like the greatest piece of folk art ever painted, like a strange dream of Americana.

 

4. Jimi Hendrix - Axis: Bold as Love. A lot of crazy and great album covers came out of psychedelia, but this is the best, hands down.

The final three are coming tomorrow!

Looking back on this I realize that most of my covers are from the 60s and 70s - in fact, the only one that's not is #10. I'd say easily that the artists I listen to come from those two decades more than any others, but they defenitely don't make up 90% of my "library," as this list would suggest. Probably half of it is simply my graphics tastes, but the other half may have to do with the sadly slowly eroding practice of putting yourself on the album cover. Nowadays, there are very, very little "non-mainstream" bands that put a photograph of themselves on the cover, which is a shame because, though often it's a pointless waste of space to sell someone's sex appeal, sometimes it can tell a lot. In each one of these album covers, the photographs tell something about the artist and the music - Caetano Veloso's almost helpless stare, the meditative spirituality of Coltrane, the sheer purposeful awkwardness of Talking Heads.

Notice that I didn't mention Sonny Rollins there.