3 MORE of my favorite album covers

It’s been awhile since my last one, but I have some free time, somehow, so here are some more album covers I love.

Baroness - Purple
I had to go with one of John Dyer Baizley’s many album covers at least once within this sporadic series of visual art-related posts. Aside from the artwork he does for his own band, Baizley’s art nouveau pieces have graced beautifully the front of albums from bands like Skeltonwitch, Pig Destroyer, and Kvelertak, just to name a few. I went for one from his own band’s discography, the cover from Purple, which is also my favorite album of theirs so far (of which I am eagerly awaiting the follow-up). The Purple cover captures much of what makes the previous Baroness covers, as well as Baizley’s work for other artists, so captivating. The style presents everything right upfront without hiding details, but the paintings are still so packed full of said detail it still takes time to unwrap it all. Purple is no different, but it captures the essence of Baizley’s all-around gorgeous style at, possibly, its highest level of beauty. It continues the color-focused theme of Baroness’ albums and the consistency of motifs within the artworks for each previous record: mostly nude women enveloped by luscious, natural forms of plant and animal life over a psychedelic backdrop. In Purple’s cover, rats, eagles, greyhounds, berries, nails, honeybees, and flowers of various types surround the four women in each quadrant in intricate and mesmerizing ways, and despite how much is going on at once in the picture, it’s an easy one to take in and take piece by piece too. Baizley is a fantastic artist on both the visual and auditory fronts, and Purple captures that perfectly.
Gorguts - Pleiades’ Dust
The 24 X 24 poster that lives beneath the glass covering on my desk is another magnificently detailed piece to behold. Created by one Zbigniew M. Bielak, who also did the cover for Mayhem’s Esoteric Warfare and the similar inner artwork for Ghost’s Meliora, the cover of Pleiades’ Dust tells a story, the history the band writes about on the single-track EP: the destruction of the House of Wisdom in 13th century Baghdad by Mongol invaders. The album and the cover focus on the tragedy of the loss of knowledge of the library’s destruction, with the cover depicting torn manuscripts strewn between armed Mongol horsemen and body-less hands desperately trying to piece the shreds back together as arrows pierce books and the despondent eyes of the the figurative scholar. It’s a gripping piece that echoes its album’s somber reminder of the value of academic knowledge and that there are those who do indeed seek to suppress it and even erase it if it stands as an obstacle to their goals.
Meshuggah - Nothing
It’s not just my crazy bias for Meshuggah that put this album here. I really love the terrifying, abstract chaos of this cover. Of the two versions (the orange-tinted original and the blue-tinted cover), I slightly prefer the blue cover that graces the remastered version of the album. The appeal of this cover for me is similar to that of covers like Hell Awaits and Abandon All Life. I love the convergent/divergent rays of energy that focus on a central facial figure whose horrified expression captures the existential absence that Nothing implies.

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