Henrik Falck: The Four Best Album Covers of All Time

Although I'm against buying CDs out of principle (it's a short story), I'm a big fan of album covers. Nice ones, that is. After many years of pondering, I will now humbly present to you the four best designed album covers of all time.

This is not to say these are the best albums, music wise, ever, although all of them are incidentally (or is it?) among my absolute favorite albums. Without further search engine spam, I give you, in somewhat ranked order, the covers of these for respective masterpieces of musical history:

Led Zeppelin
the first album

The cover shows a drawing of a photo of the Hindenburg zeppelin crashing, like a lead zeppelin, and burning. Huge impact, don't you think? The impression is for me just like the music on the album.

Pink Floyd (who else?)
The Dark Side of the Moon

In this case too the cover shadows the mood of the album, in some strange way. It shows a prism refracting white light into the full spectrum of colors - or, of course, the opposite (which I think is the beauty of it). I'm inclined to say the Led Zeppelin cover is the best with this one being second, but, as an aside, for sure The Dark Side of the Moon is the best album ever made music wise.

Deltron 3030

I'm not really sure what the cover of the best hip-hop album ever made is supposed to depict, but also in this case it conveys the theme of the album; the dystopian story of mech pilot/rapper Deltron Zero in the year 3030. It looks like something from an early 20th century science fiction novel a la Metropolis, with people crossing a bridge and entering a sphere-like structure on the other side.

The Music
Welcome to the North

The step from 3rd to 4th place is large. In some way I think this album cover represents many nice ones with a similar theme - sweet harmony of colors and shapes basically. But this album does it best. Unfortunately, I don't get any feeling of connection between the cover and the music on the album. (This second album is quite disappointing compared to The Music's first, self-titled, album anyway.) But anyway, the design is kinda perfect: I mean the colors, the mirroring, all make it look very web 2.0, and yet it definitely doesn't seem to be computer generated. I think they actually set this up in plastics with a real mirror and lights and stuff.

That concludes today's completely subjective listing presented as fact. Isn't it intriguing that two out of four albums here, even though it's supposed to be about design, are theme albums? I really love theme albums. Especially Deltron 3030 - the story it tells from beginning (cameo by my beloved Damon Albarn) to end (cameo Damon Albarn) actually makes a good (somewhat extremely ironic) science fiction story in itself.

Now for some runners-up:

S.P.O.C.K
Where Rockets Fly
cool future/retro drawing