looking Minnesota, feeling California

There has been a fantastic spate of good albums coming out lately featuring artwork by Minnesota artists.  Of course, much of that music has been locally grown, and in our thriving lil' artworld, like supports like.  Many MN musicians either know, or are themselves, practicing artists/designers.  Due to the awesomeness of some of this music and probably, the geographically-obliterating tendencies of social media and internet marketing presences, Minnesota is really rockin' it in the rock n' roll design world.

Bon Iver - Bon Iver   cover by Gregory Euclide

I first saw Gregory Euclide's art at the Urban Bean coffee shop in Uptown about 12 years ago.  While there was a nodding resemblance to his current work - soft blues and greens, almost pastels, and layers of imagery that slide deftly between abstracted landscapes and well-rendered moments of realism - he has since drastically refined his drawing skills and expanded his approach to creating more sculptural paintings and installations.  I'm happy to have this gorgeous new Bon Iver on vinyl for the obvious sonic reasons, but it also offers a drastically  better viewing vantage on the surreal landscape that Euclide created for this cover art.  Reading like a Japanese scroll, the painting brings you up into the background space rather than creating a receding sense of deep perspective.  It's also somewhat easier to see, with the larger format of the lp,  that the paper Euclide created the painting/drawing on, has actually been ripped and crumpled, toying with the relative lack of pictorial depth by creating a literal depth of 3-D-ness with the piece.  There's a nice synergy between the artwork and the music here too.  The expanded palate of instruments Justin Vernon  uses on his new compositions create denser layers than on previous work, with banjos and staccato drum brushes standing sharp against the guitar and his wavering voice, both of which were recorded with a guazed layer of reverb and auto-tune. Overall it is, as they say, a nice package.

Japanese landscape painting - artist unknown

I was fortunate enough to be at the Bombay Sweets record release show at the Turf Club this past Saturday night.  Brute Heart, Birthday Suits, Bombay Sweets, and Blind Shake - that's an amazing line-up already before you add in Michael Yonkers showing up late night to join the Blind Shake for 5 or 6 crazy-a*#! songs that would've been worth the price of admission alone...though the Birthday Suits set had already taken care of that.  Besides the sheer energy and great music that each of these sonically diverse bands brought to the stage, they also each boast excellent recent releases that showcase MN artists/designers as the aesthetic arbiters of our consumption of their products.  And how yummy it is!

Brute Heart has released 2 full lengths in the last couple years, 2009's Brass Beads and this year's Lonely Hunter.   The Brass Beads cover featured a painting by local duo Tynan Kerr & Andie Mazorol and the even better 2011 lp, Lonely Hunter, features artwork by local phenom Crystal Quinn.  

Brute Heart - Lonely Hunter    art by Crystal Quinn

Birthday Suits destroyed the Turf this night, as they do really everywhere they play.  Calm and incredibly mellow in person,  they   tear. shit. up.   on stage and they do it with aplomb. 

Birthday Suits - The Minnesota: Mouth to Mouth

Bombay Sweets were the new kids on the block tonight.  I didn't know them so much as the other bands and they stepped into their rock star spotlight with a bit more trepidation - seen through their overdramatized stage presence and apparent hesitancy to really stretch it out musically.   When they did stray from the page a bit and stretch things out, they were at their best and were a band I'd like to see some more of.

Artwork by Aesthetic Apparatus

The Blind Shake!  Shit...I guess I really had no idea who these guys were.  I'd heard the name enough but hadn't seen a show yet.  It seemed like they had emerged from a Navy Seals stake-out of Devo's house via a 1985 punk portal - channeling some revved-up version of Wire...then, about 1:30am, Michael Yonkers came out to join them...Minneapolis's wild-card-up-the-sleeve for the past 20+ years.  They truly kicked out the jams and put out another 40 minutes of amazing rock n' roll.   epic.  The artwork for their newest release features a painting by The Blind Shake's own Jim Blaha. 

art by Jim Blaha

It was a couple years ago already that POS put out his kick-ass Never Better album.  Artwork by Eric Carlson (also of Hardland/Heartland).  Carlson is a fantastic draftsman who balances a tight technical proficiency with defiant drips, smudges, and off-kilter decisions all created with a whip-smart graphic designer eye.

POS - Never Better   cover art by Eric Carlson

An aside:

Sooo, who cares.  the album is dead right?  The thumbnailed album art is just a marker of on the screen - not art anymore but just a blip of information to click on?  I'm certainly a bit old fashioned when it comes to this but I really think that album art is an amazing reflection, and sometimes even an arbiter, of contemporary pop-culture consumer's tastes.  Music is still the most broadly consumed artform out there...nevermind how 'artsy' your tastes are, music is being written, recorded, played, listened to, danced to, etc. by pretty much every demographic and right or left-leaning yahoo out there.

Back in the day, when the transition was being made from hand-cranked 78's and 45's to long-play 33rpm's, jazz was the primary music being pressed on vinyl.  From the very get-go, the graphic design of the album art was integral to the package being marketed and sold.  The Blue Note imprint quickly found their signature look in the graphic work of Reid Miles.

Bold shadows on dynamically posed musicians - most not yet household names, often with a vibrant monochromatic tinted filter, and precisely modern and graphic font and text choices - designed with "a splendid sense of certainty"* and a new, for the time, importance placed on space - negative and positive - in the layout.  These were some of the first 'long play' albums (not 78rpm singles) being sold in the world ever! and the first introduction, on this scale, of black artists creating such phenomenally proficient and groundbreaking performances.  They were being packaged as such - iconic individuals, thoughtful and in charge of the proceedings contained within, and - just to slightly placate the biases of the times - not entirely black skinned, just a filtered touch of red, white or blue over the nicely sleeved package.


* from Robin Kinross, Eye Magazine, 2001