![]() Get Happy!! / Imperial Bedroom (1980, 1982)ĭead Can Dance was the first 4AD band that really registered for me. Virgin Records even sprung for the classy uncoated paper stock and a registered deboss! Who says major labels always suck? Alas, Camper's Virgin albums are still unavailable for streaming due to a dispute between the label and the band. For the Sweetheart cover, Bruce Licher of Independent Project Press created an idiosyncratic mix of Americana, Western myth and Ottoman mysticism (?) that complements the near-perfect eclectic suite of songs within. As California natives, they certainly absorbed these influences but funneled them through an anarchic Wild-West-Captain-Beefheart-post-punk flume. The Grateful Dead's music bores me silly, and the associated visual culture-tie-dye, Victor Mocosco posters-has devolved into boring nostalgia at best, tired kitsch at worst.Ĭamper Van Beethoven is different. But I never bought into any of the prototypical hippie-psychedelic culture before or after I relocated there. But I wouldn't have even asked the questions if I hadn't been so enamored with the visuals in the first place.įor us western Pennsylvania folk, California was the promised land of the wild and weird. ![]() to so many of us in the band's early years. Swallow the rapture?" So many questions-and that was the point. Why are the songs out of order on the back cover? "Bury magnets. Is that the top half of drummer Bill Berry's face? Is it Life's or Lifes? Did they forget the apostrophe? Never mind, it was months after I bought the record before I really noticed the buffaloes. ![]() Lifes Rich Pageant is my favorite-album and sleeve. Drawing on the surreal and gothic facets of the American South where the band formed, Stipe created art as elliptical and mysterious as his song lyrics. All designed by lead singer Michael Stipe with various collaborators, these sleeves married the high art aspirations of designers like Peter Saville and Vaughan Oliver with the handcrafted DIY spirit of punk rock, epitomized by Jamie Reid's work for the Sex Pistols. I've always asserted that the missing link between the refined sleeve design for U.K.-based post-punk and new wave bands in the 1980s and the more scrappy album art created by 1990s indie rock bands like Pavement, Guided By Voices and Bonnie "Prince" Billy is the IRS-label R.E.M. ![]()
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