Great Album Covers: Parallax

It has been a year of very memorable album covers, from the classic 4AD aping cover of Wye Oak's Civilian to the crying crude drawing of Panda Bear's Tomboy to the oblique, borderline-suicidal looking cover of Destroyer's Kaputt. None, however, seems as in tune with its musical content as this.

Atlas Sound is Bradford Cox's solo project outside of Deerhunter, and his covers have featured deformed looking men with Marfan's syndrome-like bodies similar to Cox's own (I think Logos may even have him on the cover). This one, however, glamorizes Cox in a classic 50s/60s pop-vocalist way, with a washed out color style. Yet as close as he is to the camera on the cover, and thus to the viewer...as mellow and accessible as Parallax is as an album...it's all still quite distant and confused. Cox is deliberately averting his gaze, or perhaps he's distracted with a thought of someone or something from the past. Also note that he is still half in darkness.

Anyway, maybe I'm over-analyzing again. All that artsy intellectual ruminating aside, it is a hell of a great cover. And a hell of a great record. But that is a blog entry for another time.