What I think makes a great album cover varies from album to album. Sometimes something as simple as a portrait of the artist is what’s right for the album, and sometimes a magnificent work of art doesn’t fit properly. An album cover like the one for Car Seat Headrest’s “Twin Fantasy” works perfectly for the album, but wouldn’t really work for many other albums apart from other lo-fi indie albums in the same vein.

The cover fits very well with the album which is a lo-fi indie rock album that was originally recorded by Will Toledo who not only drew the cover, he also played and recorded every instrument himself in his bedroom with a cheap laptop microphone. He later went on to re-record the album with a band in a proper studio and used a reversed version of the album cover. ” I kind of felt that these were demos I was recording when I was doing the original thing, I felt like I could re-record it better. So far, it’s worked out,” he said in a rolling stone article about why he re-recorded the album.

I think the simplicity of the cover for the album works really well with the sound and feel of the album. An album cover that’s on the complete opposite end of the spectrum is the cover by Jason Galea for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s album “Murder of the Universe.

The album is an epic psych-rock masterpiece that tells three stories in three separate distinct chapters of the album. One is the tale of a man who meets an “altered beast” and yearns to become altered too, the second is a tale of The Lord of Lightning in a battle with the Balrog, and the third is a tale of a robot named “Han-Tyumi” who wants nothing, but to be like a human and it believes the most human thing you can do is vomit so he builds a “Soy-Protein Munt Machine” to give him the ability to vomit, but he vomits so much it consumes everything and “murders” the universe. The stories are mainly told through narration and lyrics sparsed throughout. The album cover had to be something to reflect the albums intensity and chaos and Galea created an equal masterpiece to go along with the album. This album is also the third in a trilogy of albums by the band and has elements from the previous two albums in the trilogy.

He started making the cover by taking the two previous albums in the trilogy and running them through the dreamscope app and then sketching on top of them and then further and further developing his ideas. It also appears like he is using the dreamscope app a lot throughout the process and getting ideas from it. He eventually finished the sketch and took it to canvas and painted the finished piece.

I believe that both these album covers brilliant and fit the albums perfectly. They couldn’t further apart stylistically, but are both great works of art.

One of my favourite covers that Galea has made is something he made for a single for the same band. I really like the use of colours and how well it provides an image while being quite simple. I want to replicate something like this where it’s mainly colour and outlines to create a landscape image.

Other than album covers I’ve been really interested in traditional Japanese art such as Ukiyo-e. Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art consisting of woodblock prints and paintings of landscapes, flora, fauna and erotica. I’ve been really inspired by a lot of works. The works by Hokusai and Hiroshige are some of my favourite works of all time. Hokusai is known for creating the incredibly famous piece, “The Great Wave.” Hiroshige is known for his series “One Hundred Views of Edo,” and for Vincent Van Gogh recreating one of his works from that series. Here are my favourite works of theirs.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa is Hokusai’s most well-known piece and Fine Wind, Clear Morning is my favourite of his and is one of my favourite pieces of all time. I completely adore Hiroshige’s pieces. There’s always something I love about all of his works. I think his use of colour is beautiful. All of his works always have something that draws you to a certain point of the image, but when you take a look at the whole piece, there’s an incredible amount of detail and intricacy. Because I can never get music out of my head I also want to again talk about another cover that I really like which very clearly references and is inspired by Fine Wind, Clear Morning. The cover for Kanye West’s and Kid Cudi’s Kids See Ghosts by Takashi Murakami.

I absolutely love this cover. The colours, the Mount Fuji in the background, the way the Mount Fuji frames the ghost on the right, the characters in the foreground, everything about this cover I love. This cover is one I’m really inspired by especially. I want to try to emulate something like this using watercolour. I also want to further research into woodblock printing and how it’s done and try to attempt it myself in the future, but I don’t think I’m going to attempt it for my cover as it seems like something I need to learn more about and I won’t have enough time to research for this project.

References:

Bandcamp.com. (2011). Twin Fantasy, by Car Seat Headrest. [online] Available at: https://carseatheadrest.bandcamp.com/album/twin-fantasy [Accessed 16 May 2019].

Reiff, C. (2018). Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo Talks ‘Twin Fantasy’ Remake – Rolling Stone. [online] Rollingstone.com. Available at: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/inside-car-seat-headrests-new-old-fantasy-200496/ [Accessed 16 May 2019].

Galea, J. (2017). KGLW MOTU. [online] Jasongalea.com. Available at: https://www.jasongalea.com/kglw-motu.html [Accessed 16 May 2019].

Heavenly Emporium. (2017). King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – Murder Of The Universe. [online] Available at: http://heavenlyemporium.com/buy/murder-of-the-universe-3/ [Accessed 16 May 2019].

Galea, J. (2014). KGLW – I’m In Your Mind Fuzz. [online] Jasongalea.com. Available at: https://www.jasongalea.com/kglw—i-m-in-your-mind-fuzz.html [Accessed 16 May 2019].

Galea, J. (2016). KGLW Nonagon Infinity. [online] Jasongalea.com. Available at: https://www.jasongalea.com/kglw-nonagon-infinity.html [Accessed 16 May 2019].

Galea, J. (2017). Jason Galea on Instagram: “Here’s the making of video for the MOTU cover. I used AI computers and projectors to help get me there. The next album cover will be hand…”. [online] Instagram. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/BVjxzoUACH7/ [Accessed 16 May 2019].

Metmuseum.org. (n.d.). Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei). [online] Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/JP1847/ [Accessed 16 May 2019].

Hiroshige.org.uk. (n.d.). Great Tōkaidō. [online] Available at: https://www.hiroshige.org.uk/Tokaido_Series/Tokaido_Great.htm [Accessed 16 May 2019].

Estiler, K. (2018). The Artwork That Inspired Kid Cudi & Kanye West’s ‘Kids See Ghosts’ Album Cover. [online] HYPEBEAST. Available at: https://hypebeast.com/2018/6/kanye-west-kid-cudi-takashi-murakami-kids-see-ghosts-album-artwork [Accessed 18 May 2019].

YouTube. (2017). King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – The Last Oasis (Official Audio). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF_eiMLG9Ho [Accessed 3 Jun. 2019].

I personally think nowadays there isn’t really such a thing as originality anymore. There’s been so much art in the past century that having a truly original idea is almost impossible. I think to actually be somewhat original you need to have many influences and put your own creative mind into your projects and find your own style through experimenting and research. I think the idea of getting angry at people who use similar styles and have similar influences as you is pointless as everything you make is going to be inspired by other people. However there are times where people completely plagiarise other peoples ideas.

Even though I don’t think this counts as plagiarism, this is an example of someone claiming plagiarism.

Shynola vs Owen Trevor

Shynola released a music video made for the band Coldplay in 2011. The video was made using stop motion and features a superhero saving a damsel in distress while interacting with objects drawn using chalk.

After the video was released the musician Andy Gallagher accused Coldplay of plagiarising one of his video that was released over 2 years prior. It’s a video that features the musician in stop motion interacting with objects drawn with chalk.

Shynola then made response to the claim. In the response they claimed that they had never even seen Gallagher’s video before. They broke down their video and showed where they got influences for the video and also showed a video made prior to both the music videos and both creators were very clearly inspired by that particular video.

My Opinion

I personally believe that neither of the videos were original and one of them claiming that one ripped the other off is ridiculous. I feel that Shynola had a great response and was very fair and calm. Both creators used similar techniques and had similar influences so the fact that the videos are somewhat similar isn’t surprising. I think Shynola also shared a good point at the end of their response which was “if artists start accusing each other of plagiarism over music videos, where will it end? Bands suing each other for concert effects like pyro, lights and fog?”

In recent years there’s been many claims of plagiarism especially over music and music videos. An example I think of immediately is the Ed Sheeran vs the Marvin Gaye Estate where they claimed Sheeran had plagiarised a Marvin Gaye song for using the same chord progression even though the chord progression is a very simple one that is used very often.