Top 10 beautiful album covers - 1 EACH GROUP

1) BITCHES BREW - MILES DAVIS
2) MOVING PICTURES - RUSH
3) TALES FROM TOPOGRAPHIC OCEANS - YES
4) WISH YOU WERE - PINK FLOYD
5) IN THROUGH THE OUT DOOR - LED ZEPPELIN
6) FUGAZI - MARILLION
7) STAND UP - JETHRO TULL
8) IN THE LAND OF GREY AND PINK - CARAVAN
9) LEFTOVERTURE - KANSAS
10) ABBEY ROAD - THE BEATLES

The back cover is great too!





Ah, the good old fold-up covers.
Can't think of any more right now; I'll add the rest later.


Edited by BaldFriede - December 07 2008 at 16:07

topofsm wrote: I see no love for "Keys of Ascension", which IMO is the most breathtaking album cover ever. I haven't listened to it, but I've always looked at the cover and just gone "Wow".

Way too many to choose from and very hard to pick just one from each group or even ten groups,but,here's

Edited by mourningknight - December 07 2008 at 18:00

listen wrote:   I like that cover a lot! Great job! How did you do it?

Yes - Drama
Genesis - Nursery cryme
Jethro Tull - Stand up (LP only, otherwise Thick as a brick)
Rush - A farewell to kings
Pink Floyd - Wish you were here
Return to forever - Romantic warrior
Miles Davis - Bitches brew
Frank Zappa - Hot Rats
ELP - Brain salad surgery

And finally, possibly the best of them all:

Gentle giant - Acquiring the taste

Let's take another stab at it:

1. Asia - s/t
2. Dire Straits - s/t
3. Emerson, Lake & Palmer - s/t
4. Fireships - Peter Hammill
5. Trespass - Genesis
6. Les Porches - Maneige
7. Dark Side Of The Moon - Pink Floyd
8. Tales From Topographic Oceans - Yes
9. Sea Song - Robert Wyatt
10. The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome - Van Der Graaf

A few obvious ones on here, but all of these have some sort of beauty, bleak or otherwise, to my mind.

"Beauty" is of course in the eye of the beholder (and in the ear of the listener, so mine may be a bit strange. Here are two more from me:

(Ignore the little square in the corner of this reissue cover). I just love the mystic atmosphere of this cover, and it is full of strange riddles. Why do a hawk and a penguin meet on a graveyard in the middle of the night? And why are there mines with burning fuses beneath the penguin and at the spot where the hawk is about to land? Are they not aware of it? Very very strange.

You may ask "What's so beautiful about that"? To understand that you have to have the vinyl of the album which has a kind of gimmick cover with several triangles that can be folded this way and that, each time resulting in a completely different cover picture. But however you recombine them, the lines where those triangles meet always fit. It is a truly fascinating cover, and you can spend a whole afternoon trying out all of the possible recombinations of the cover art. Title and artist name, by the way, were on the back cover only.

I'll have to think of eight other ones; there are so many good ones.


Edited by BaldFriede - January 07 2009 at 08:06

*bump*

I've been thinking about this one for a while and am now finally getting around to posting,  in no particular order:





















Just examples of beautiful or thought provoking images.  In all fairness, I haven't really listened to 'Test for Echo' but I love the image, used it as a background for almost a year at one point.  Also, despite Adam and Eve being my least favorite Flower Kings album, the cover art is beautiful.

Enjoy