Really, I don’t want this column to become a monthly exercise in making easy jokes at the expense of people who are doing perfectly well making jokes of themselves without my help. Each month I click through the new releases, hoping to find something that will inspire me in a positive direction: some brilliant, evocative cover art from an unknown artist. Needless to say, so far that hasn’t been happening very much. I will try harder next month, but only if the album cover designers of the world do.

Jason Castro – s/t

It’s hard to say what about this album cover turns me off so completely.  Is it the dreads?  (Really, dude, floating in that pool the top of your head looks like something I pulled out of the shower drain earlier.)  The self-satisfied smirk?  The fine gold chain?  No, you know what?  For the most part this album cover is, objectively, not bad.  The photo is well composed, the color is great (The blue of the pool!  Those dreamy blue eyes!) – if you weren’t a judgmental dick like me, you wouldn’t leap right to making assumptions about the kind of person who would allow this album cover to be released with this photo of him on it, and you’d just think “Hm, nice photo.  Dreamy eyes.”

But!  Here’s the thing that makes this album terrible.

Those ‘o’s.  Those horrid ‘o’s in the stupid little green and blue boxes.  I ask you, what is the point of those awful ‘o’s?  Those ‘o’s are what Starbucks would use to communicate the fact that they’re really not like all the other international mega-corporations out there, they’re quirky and fun-loving, and have you tried their carbon-roasted Costa Rican?  But we don’t need a font to tell us this guy is an individual, a non-conformist: He’s floating in a pool, with a beatific smile and a head full of dreads; obviously he’s the free and easy type.  So again, what is the point of these ridiculous ‘o’s?  They’re just hammering home a point that is made within the first .05 seconds of viewing this photo.  Please, designers, can we have a bit more restraint with our fonts?

Straight No Chaser – With a Twist

So, there’s this band . . . I think they’re kinda jazzy?  (They’re named after a Monk tune, anyway.)  And there are eight of them. (Or are there any multiples in there?  Honestly, I can’t be bothered to figure it out.  They all look like the same person, even the black guy.)  And they’re just hanging out in these multi-colored pastel squares, chillin’ out, hands in pockets, or slightly swaying, and laughing, and having a grand old time, and OH MY GOD WHY WOULD ANYONE LISTEN TO THIS ALBUM WHEN JUST LOOKING AT THIS GIANT PILE OF JACKASS MAKES ME WANT TO PREEMPTIVELY JAM ICEPICKS IN MY EARS?????

All right, let me step back for a minute.  Sorry.

The interesting thing about this cover is that its problem is sort of the opposite of Jason Castro’s: The design – and even the font choices – is just fine.  The colors could be a little more interesting, but there’s nothing offensive about it.  Some fields of color, tied together with a black frame and a couple of tastefully chosen fonts.  But for some reason the band – or the designer, or the label, or someone’s blind friend – decided that what really needed to happen was for the band to cavort around in front of a green screen like frat boys crashing a wedding, and then for each of them to be on the cover, floating in their own little color-pods.  I would like to argue, however, that not only do these pictures not make the album cover better, they take the album cover from pleasant if somewhat boring to COMPLETELY SOUL-CRUSHINGLY AWFUL in one fell swoop.  In fact, if they could go back in time and take themselves out of the artwork, I’m pretty sure this would make the album approximately 25 billion times better.

Don’t believe me?  OK, here we are, then:

Straight No Chaser, I have just improved your album immeasurably.  You’re welcome.  I’ll send my bill to your label.

Here’s the thing, though.  I can pretty much guarantee, based on the original version of this album cover, that this particular record is a terrible, godawful piece of crap that I would never in my life want to subject my ears to.  The edited version manages to mask this fact; if I saw it somewhere, I might give a brief listen just to hear what this band that had the audacity to name itself after a piece of music by the genius Thelonius Monk might be all about.  The art as it stands, however, has saved me the experience, so I guess I should thank the designer for revealing this band of posturing dicks for what they are.

Christian Scott – Sexy Magic Ride

Just to take us out on a light note, I had to share this with you.  There’s a young trumpet player named Christian Scott who’s been making waves lately.  I read a great interview with him where he verbally knocked around Wynton Marsalis for a while, which always makes me happy.  After reading him talk shit for a while, I figured I should hear his music, so I did what I pretty much always do in this situation and looked for him on lala.com.  I saw and listened to some of the albums mentioned in the article (which are fantastic, by the way), but then I found others with titles like Yo Let’s Party, Pump That Bass, and, of course, Sexy Magic Ride.  At first I just thought “wow, this Scott fellow really is an iconoclast.”  But on further examination it was revealed that the music world boasts two very different Christian Scotts – one of whom makes ground-breaking music jumping off from jazz roots, and one of whom makes (I’m assuming) moronic, simple-minded dance music for jerks.  He also, I would wager, has a friend with Photoshop who’s really into doing design and stuff, and has a vast library of clip art and shitty fonts.  There are a bunch of covers to choose from (he does a lot of singles), but this one, from the ludicrous title to the dancing musical notation to the glittering disco ball to the tough-guy-with-baseball-hat-under-a-bridge photo, pretty much has it all.