DAYLIGHT ROBBERY - Red Tape EP

my copy of the DAYLIGHT ROBBERY 7" came in the mail this week with a bunch of great stuff from RESIDUE RECORDS. really glad to see that these covers were printed as a 3 color spot on a nice natural stock paper, very classy looking! i really love the cover art and how they continued to work the "red tape" idea into the folded lyric sheet (a photocopy on red paper... so punk, i know!) all around great release, check it out if you come across it....

DIY ALBUM ART - new book by J. Namdev Hardisty

this is a pretty awesome new book by J. Namdev Hardisty about the aesthetic of the DIY punk and hardcore records of the 1990's. after searching for a few months to try and find this book locally, i gave up last week and just ordered it from amazon. i knew i would be pretty stoked on this book not only because i love the art of the punk and hardcore movement, but also because this is a visual chronicle of the era that i was introduced to when i was first discovering this music scene back in the summer of 1994. that said, this book far exceeded my expectations.... a slick and stunning presentation of some of the best artifacts from the hay day of DIY record art. of course i didn't know it at the time, but that really was the hay day for this style of "need-driven aesthetics". once home computers became affordable in the late 90's and early 2000's people stopped making records with their hands and things got a bit lazy looking. what's even worse is that it didn't occur to me how far we've drifted away from this visual style until i was flipping thru this book, seeing page after page of screened, hand stamped, and glued on cover art. check out the pics of some of my favs and then go find the book, you won't be sorry!

BROKEN PATTERNS - 2nd 7" coming soon!

i just finished designing and screen printing the 7" covers for my band Broken Patterns second release due out very soon on Six Feet Under Records. it's a 2 color screen print that will be a 3 fold sleeve once i finish cutting them all out! there will only be 500 available, so keep an eye on the Six Feet Under website if you're interested in picking one up.....

FAILURES - Debut 12"

last month i made a post about the newer FAILURES 7" and realized that i never got around to photographing their debut 12" that came out early this year for a post...

just like their 7", Mark McCoy is the man responsible for this head-turning layout. the most notable signature of his style on this release would be the front and back panels of the cover, which have been decorated with his stark, dark and strange imagery. the pulled back scale of the artwork so that these two over saturated images are floating in negative white space really pulls you into the designs. it was also a nice touch to print black on the inside of the glued covers and fashion the vinyl with a matching black dust sleeve....

instead of a standard lyric sheet, this record comes with an 8.5"x8.5" black envelope with the word FAILURES printed in silver on the front. the envelope contains two sheets of paper, one a lyric sheet and the other an essay titled "the realization of a failure", all which appear to be typeset using an actual typewriter! .....classic mid 90's layout at its finest! keep the FAILURES coming guys...

HEX DISPENSERS - Winchester Mystery House LP

Austin's Hex Dispensers recently came out with their 2nd LP on Douchemaster Records, and it seems they really got their formula dialed in on this release. this record is near flawless musically and shows a lot of growth as a band in developing their unique "tongue in cheek dark" sound, and the layout is a perfectly paired continuation of that vibe. while i have to admit that the cover art feels a bit lacking to me, the concept works well with the record as a whole, especially with how it relates to the back panel. i love all the chopped up band pics mixed in with the hand set typography and the sharp contrast of the white dotted lines! the chaotic type idea is carried thru to the printed and glued inner dust sleeve, displaying the titles in hand set type along with the lyrics in a random light-to-bold typesetting.

Davila 666

Davila 666 are a power pop band from Puerto Rico that just released this new ep on Douche Master Records. they were pretty great live when they passed thru LA, so i decided to pick up this single for review since the cover art is so rad.... they put together a nice combination of photo / photocopied images with loosely hand drawn elements for a unique look on the front and back cover panels. they also took a true punk approach to type by mixing up a scanned in and cut apart typeface with hand-written type throughout the layout. by the way, is that WATERCOLOR i see..... awesome!

THE SPITS - new tour 7"

The Spits just toured thu LA again this past month and i grabbed this cool as fuck limited tour 7" that they had with them! the packaging on this record is simply a printed 45 sleeve on a nicer toothed paper and then die cut with a big hole in the center to reveal the records A and B side labels, which is the standard format for all the Slovenly 7" singles. the artwork is a bit rough around the edges... a rather crude in execution cut and paste 2 color mash up, but it's so perfectly in line with the overall vibe of the band that all the imperfections i would normally pick at don't bother me at all. one thing that i do find interesting about this record is that it's a 2 color spot offset print job that was set up to overprint as though it was a screen print. kinda odd-ball.... you don't really see that too much in the printed media world, and that a shame cause it yields a pretty cool result!

FEEL THE DARKNESS - new screen printed poster available

finally took some pics of November's art print and listed it in my etsy store! this one is a 5 color screen in an edition of 40, and it's also an 18"x24" print on 100lb cover stock paper. check out more of my work here...

FAILURES...

Painkiller Records just recently released this FAILURES 7" and did a pretty knock-out job with it! seriously, this is the greatest all-white themed record layout since the beatles released the white album! i mean, talk about lush, both the cover sleeve and the inner sleeve are printed on a heavier stock water color paper. the mix of high saturation in the artwork with the printing on this stock helps to futher obscure Mark McCoy's dark and dirty imagery. love that minimal approach to the A and B side label art.....it's so white! awesome. this reminds me how i need to make a post about their LP that came out earlier this year....