Still reeling from the announcement of the retirement of Dr. David Thorpe, the cosmos has seen fit to balance the scales by delivering into my inbox a piece of very good news: my favorite band, The Wedding Present has recorded a new album, set to be released May 8th. Even better, the band has acquired the services once again of legendary producer (sorry, engineer) Steve Albini to record the album. 
Apparently, founding and only original remaining member David Gedge (front) has been living in L.A. for the last year getting in touch with his inner rock star. He seems a very un-L.A. sort of guy, but I guess this is his way of dealing with the mid-life crisis. In any case, this is fantastic news (for me, at least). Albini also produced their 1991 masterpiece, Seamonsters which has to go down as one of the most underrated albums of the 1990's. Expect lots of guitars. The album is apparently titled, El Ray which I believe is a nod to a music venue in L.A. It also features a song titled, "Spider-Man". My favorite band writing a song about my favorite super hero. Doesn't get much better than that. Unless of course it sounds like "Sucker", one of their weakest efforts.
But the last album was very good, so I have no reason to expect they've lost the touch. Seamonsters featured some of the coolest artwork of any album in my opinion, and even had two different variations of sleeve art (I've uploaded all the artwork from the US release for your consideration). One version released to the rest of the world on RCA, and a different version along the same theme released in the U.S. on the now sadly defunct First Warning label. I like this artwork so much, in fact, that I have long wanted to make it into a triptych art print to display at home. The artist, Hitch, seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth though as I couldn't find anything about him on the web.Recently, however, I determined that he's now teaching at some university in England and has more or less retired from art. Furthermore, he does notown the artwork for any of the things he did for the band; they now belong to RCA. So any hope of getting camera-ready stuff directly from him is basically gone. Which means if I want to to do this project, I'm going to have to get creative. The US artwork (some of which is shown above) is only available in CD format (as opposed to the other version which, at least is available in larger LP format as well). So I'm going to have to get creative and find a way to clean up what I've got as well as find a company which will create the actual series of images for me to mount and/or frame.
If any of my legion of loyal readers can recommend a Boston-area company I could talk to about this project, I'd appreciate it. Now we wait for May 8th! If you are unfamiliar with the band, I recommend checking them out.
6 comments:
Definitely some cool artwork and great news on the new album.
You could always scan in the artwork and reprint it the same size or slightly larger and then frame it. How large were you hoping to get these prints?
Not sure. probably about the size of a standard album cover, but depending on how they're arranged that answer could change. I think it's going to be as much about how to present them as anything.
They could also be done in a collage rather than as standalone, but their square shape limits my options.
I think you could have a nice beveled matte over 2 rows of 3 images, or 2 rows of 2 images - then frame it.
Do you know of any stores that could print/matte/frame it?
Corners usually does a good job. I've had a bunch of stuff framed there.
Michael's sells mattes/frame if you want to do it yourself. I have a matte cutter too - if you buy mattes and want to cut them.
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