Showing posts with label screensaver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label screensaver. Show all posts

Monday, August 17, 2015

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

32. Uriah Heep - Very 'Eavy. . . Very 'Umble





This image is not from Tales from the Crypt. This is David Byron on the cover of the UK release of Uriah Heep's debut album. His cobwebbed face occupies the whole front sleeve and
is here reproduced six times to fill the 18x10 canvass. The recolouring of the image at bottom right was done in order to match the letters of the band's name which, together 
with the album title, has been distorted with the wave filter.


The album was generally panned by the mainstream critical press upon its release, although it has since been acknowledged as an early classic of the heavy metal genre.
The harshest critic was Rolling Stone magazine reviewer, Melissa Mills, who began her review, "If this group makes it I'll have to commit suicide. From the first note
you know you don't want to hear any more." Source


That's a rather horrific note, but a mouth agape could be making a sound begging to be heard. Byron is the lead vocalist and he wrote almost all of the songs
in this album. And 46 years on the band was still touring.
Down Under. 


Here's David Byron not singing.



Artwork by Robin Nicol, photo by Pete Smith. Album produced by Gerry Bron. Vertigo (UK) 1970. 


Uriah Heep are considered one of the most underrated progressive rock bands to come out of Britain's acclaimed classic rock era of late 1960's and early 1970's. A very diverse band, 
comprised of many individual talents, namely David Byron's incredible and iconic falsetto voice, Mick Box's roaring wah-wah virtuoso guitar style and Ken Hensley's raging organ,
Uriah Heep never seemed to gain any recognition, not even in Britain. Though being considered a progressive rock band in every sense of the word, Heep's first studio album,
Very 'Eavy... Very 'Umblereleased in June 1970, is a much more diverse album in style, ranging from blues to hard rock and heavy metal. Critics quickly dismissed any potential 
of Uriah Heep becoming big, but regardless of critics, Very 'Eavy... Very 'Umble presents itself as a promising debut. More


The album's US release (Mercury 1970) has a different album sleeve design, also by Robert Nicol.




(A) Gypsy - Walking in Your Shadow - Come Away Melinda - Lucy Blues

(B) Dreammare - Real Turned On - I'll Keep on Trying - Wake Up (Set Your Sights)

"Gypsy" live in London 2014 from Frontiers Music srl on YouTube.


            

  

Thursday, June 25, 2015

30. The Band - The Band


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On this work, the bottom third of the the photo on the original album cover art design was cropped off and the remaining image was mirrored. The resulting image, now about equal in
measurement on all sides was positioned to the right of the brown canvass which had already been set to measure 18x10. A smaller reproduction of the original album cover photo
was pasted at left and the album title was enlarged and pasted above it.


Here's the original album cover art design.  



No. 45, Rolling Stone, 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 45, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000.


Album design by Bob Cato, photo by Elliot Landy. Album produced by John Simon. Capitol 1969.


Designed by the great Bob Cato, using an Elliot Landy photograph, this simple cover speaks volumes of what waits inside. Their first album, Music From Big Pink
did not show the members of the group on either the front or the back; you had to open it up to see the group. Here they confront you head-on, staring at you
from another time. This was the time of paisley and psychedelic design and fonts. Not this band, there were dressed as workers, laborers, as if they stepped
out of 1940’s  America. Hell, they could’ve been mistaken for hobos then. The album was sepia toned as if taken from our grandparents’ scrapbook. And
the music reflected it all, and magnificently. A masterpiece. Source


It's as if an itinerant old-time medicine show somehow skipped a few generations, pulled off a two-lane Arkansas highway in 1910, and woke up in 1968, with
its remaining potions turned to hallucinogens. Of course the time travellers had stories to tell—about the wily old South, where men with names like Virgil
and Eustace tended the land, and there was pride just in surviving.

Four Canadians and one Southern "ringer" (drummer Levon Helm, who grew up in Arkansas), the Band caught what was wild and romantic about America,
and framed it in ramshackle grandeur with a touch of a hippieera batik. The musicians first played together backing rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins,
but became cohesive backing Bob Dylan during his shift from acoustic folk to rock. When the Band moved out of the Big Pink house in Woodstock,
New York, the group of talented multi-instrumentalists discovered they had something different, but no less profound, to say on their own.
That's instantly evident in the story-songs on their first album, Music from Big Pink, and this masterpiece — a one-two punch the likes of
which rock and roll hasn't seen since. Full article


(A) Across the Great Divide - Rag Mama Rag - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down - When You Awake - Up on Cripple Creek - Whispering Pines

(B) Jemima Surrender - Rockin' Chair - Look Out Cleveland - Jawbone - The Unfaithful Servant - King Harvest (Has Surely Come)


"King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" live from Robbie Robertson's studio in Woodstock NY from promised land on YouTube.


            

  

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

28. The Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed


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The album title says so.
There's the album cover art standing at right while a vinyl record with a blank label rolls down from the bottom in the same speed at the blood is dripping from top left.
You can keep the music playing while the blood starts to spill on the record and comes into contact with the tip of the needle.

Would you wish you could feel it?


Here's the Bleed without the blood.



No. 32, Rolling Stone, The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 37, Rate Your Music, The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time; No. 40, The Virgin All-Time Album Top 1000.

No. 29, Music Radar, The 50 Greatest Album Covers of All Time.

Art design by Robert Brownjohn. Album produced by Jimmy Miller. Decca (UK), London (US), 1969.


The Guardian reported on 22 November 2011 that the artwork for one of the most famous album covers – the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed
is expected to fetch up to £40,000 at auction.


The album cover displays a surreal sculpture designed by Robert Brownjohn. The image consists of the Let It Bleed record being played by the tone-arm of an antique phonograph,
and a record-changer spindle supporting several items stacked on a plate in place of a stack of records: a tape canister labelled Stones – Let It Bleed, a clock dial,
a pizza, a tyre and a cake with elaborate icing topped by figurines representing the band. The cake parts of the construction were prepared by
then-unknown cookery writer Delia Smith. The artwork was inspired by the working title of the album, which was Automatic Changer

The album cover for Let It Bleed was among the ten chosen by the Royal Mail for a set of "Classic Album Cover" postage stamps issued in January 2010.
Full Article



(A) Gimme Shelter - Love in Vain - Country Honk - Live with Me - Let It Bleed

(B) Midnight Rambler - You Got the Silver - Monkey Man - You Can't Always Get What You Want


"Gimme Shelter" live from The Rolling Stones on YouTube.