The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have a new record out and I thought to myself as I picked up the new album (it’s Blitz!) what a great cover art they have. As I listened to the album, I thought what great matches they turned out to be for the actual music of their respective albums…

Fever To Tell

Fever To Tell featured a punk-grunge-collage solution to it that mirrored the raw sound from that record.

Maybe it was lead singer’s hairdo that made me make the connection but I always thought they were trying to pay tribute to the another NYC band — the Ramones. Now that I think about it the Clash and Green Day’s Winston Smith Insomniac cover look like more of an influence.

The music itself on this album had many great tracks including Maps, Pin and my favorite — Y-Control. For the most part, a lot of the energy from this album was courtesy of Karen O’s snarling vocals over crunchy/gritty guitars on tight punk style 2 to 3 minute tracks.

Show Your Bones

The Show Your Bones legend goes — the band reached out to their fans to help come up with a Flag and they liked some so much they turned it into the cover art.

This one instantly reminded me of jasper John’s work of symbols like the various Flag works he did. Wondrously simple and beautiful how the tactile texture is responsible for the true beauty of the work.

The music of this album had everything we came to love and expect from the band but clearly you can see they sound very tight. The biggest hit on the album — Gold Lion is a haunting track that just sticks to your ears like honey. Karen O doesn’t need to snarl or hide behind guitars as much as her clear emotion is easily distinguishable as she sings. Just like the flag has fringes of unpredictable texture, so do most of the tracks.

It’s Blitz!

The latest album — It’s Blitz! has quite a striking feminist egg squashing image (although I have no idea if they intended that).

Made me think of the Saatchi collection a bit from when they came to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Damien Hirst’s bizarre animal dissections and Sarah Lucas’s fried egg coming to mind first. I feel as though I’ve seen stuff exploding on CD art before but I can’t recall anything for the life of me this moment.

Music-wise, it’s still fresh on my iPod but from my observations it’s a degree cleaner than Show Your Bones but now they have a more predictable sound but make up for it in competence. Some of the tracks like Soft Shock and Skeletons make me think of how Robert Smith from the cure would approach a mid-tempo song. There is a “delicate quality” in how both sound too.

Yeah? No? What do you think of their cover art?

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Design, Inspiration, Music, Print Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.