Judging by the Covers

Judging by the Covers

Paul O’Connor sees creative expression as well as missed opportunities in some recent traditional music album covers.

Looking at some recent traditional music releases, it so happens that a batch of female artists have used images of themselves on the covers to very good effect.

Cathy Jordan’s hot-off-the-press All the Way Home uses a cropped head-and-shoulder shot of Jordan, off-centre and backgrounded by layers of colour and leaf in a design that suggests a theme of going back over a life. Considering the nature of the work (the first solo album in a long career, and quite an archaeological one in terms of being mostly songs from her past), it seems apt and well handled.

There’s something odd about the image on the front of Gráinne Holland’s Teanga Na nGael. At first it displeases me greatly, but looking more carefully I realise it is playing with the conventions it uses. The dilapidated backdrop is not of the clichéd returning-to-nature sort; rather, it is urban and grim. Though the print is black and white, Holland’s dress is, I’m guessing, brightly coloured in reality and the cliché would have been to recolour to stand out. Instead the folds and creases of the dress are left to pick up the joins of the brickwork in the background. The pose is is reminiscent of B-movie melodrama or the silent movie era. Me thinks we’re being played.

Alyth McCormack and Triona Marshall’s Red and Gold cover is sensual, the shot cleverly set up to explore various symmetries and play with motifs and colour, as well as styled to stimulate the senses. It gives the impression of having been carefully planned, and McCormack and Marshall look like they had full faith in the process.

The close-up shot of Gráinne Murphy on her debut album Short Stories could be mistaken for just point-and-shoot stuff, only there’s something in the expression that the photographer has caught that just about manages to hold you. The city backdrop, full of life and different light, along with the title and the interesting typography and punctuation help to rescue this from dullness. Murphy almost breaks free of herself to become a character from a story; this could be a book cover (indeed, the title is a reference to a period spent writing fiction), but that half smile returns us to the world of album covers, I think.

While there are examples of less imaginative covers from female artists (I was very disappointed, for instance, with the cover of the otherwise commendable The Wishing Well from Laoise Kelly and Michelle O’Brien), these examples show what can come of fully embracing the opportunity presented by covers for further aesthetic expression.

By way of highly unscientific comparison, looking at recent releases from some male artists one sees signs of a less decisive attitude towards covers. Quite a few avoid images of themselves altogether — for instance Jack Talty and Cormac Begley’s Na Fir Bolg, Lorcán Mac Mathúna and Northern Light’s Dubh agus Geal, and Mick O’Brien and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh’s Deadly Buzz / Aoibhinn Crónán — an approach that can produce some quite dull results. 

In the ones which do feature a photograph of the male musician(s), very little thought seems to have gone into some of them. Many are painfully plain, some are badly taken, and unlike the examples above from female artists all seem to be mostly going through the motions, as if to say, ‘let’s get this over with’.

An exception here, which actually plays up the point, is MacDara Ó Raghallaigh’s Ego Trip. The self-consciousness of the name highlights the fundamental issue; and the whole exercise of producing an album, including the use of portrait images on covers (Ó Raghallaigh shows himself head down, delivering the music) is commented on superbly in the witty placing of the ‘p’ off-kilter.  

Published on 18 January 2012

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