Tag Archives: album cover art

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins By Karl Wirsum

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screamin jay hawkins photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

Karl Wirsum (1939 – 2021) used the clean style of commercial graphics and the abstracted form of a dissected frog Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (1968). who used this painting as the cover for his album Because Is In Your Mind (1970). Best known fir his 1956 song “I Put a Spell On You” and his sensational live performances, Hawkins appears here in full song, raining amoeba-shaped sweat down on a man wearing “armpit rubber,” like old fashioned galoshes, to keep the moisture at bay.

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Music, Pop Culture

Motörhead Raises a Toast: New Collectible Road Crew Beer Series Launches with Iconic Album Art

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motörhead beer cans 2

Motörhead fans now have something new to collect — and crack open. BevNomad has announced the revival launch of Road Crew, a new collaboration with one of rock’s most legendary bands, Motörhead. The new series pairs easy-drinking beer styles with limited-edition collectible cans featuring the band’s iconic album artwork, creating a release designed equally for fans, collectors, and beer enthusiasts.

A Collector-First Beer Series

The Road Crew series will roll out quarterly, with each release spotlighting a different chapter of Motörhead’s visual and musical legacy. The format is designed with collectors in mind — each can becomes both a beverage and a piece of rock memorabilia.

“Motörhead has always stood for authenticity, power, and doing things loud,” said BevNomad CEO Steve Kwapil. “This album art-inspired beer series captures that same spirit, giving fans something they can crack open today and collect for years to come.”

It’s a fitting tribute to a band whose visual identity — particularly the iconic War-Pig mascot — is nearly as recognizable as its music.

First Releases: Ace of Spades and The World Is Yours

The first two cans in the series draw from two standout Motörhead albums:

  • Release #1: Ace of Spades
  • Release #2: The World Is Yours

Both are set to launch in March, kicking off with a special event at the legendary Rainbow Bar & Grill in West Hollywood — a venue closely tied to Motörhead history and frontman Lemmy Kilmister himself.

Motörhead manager Todd Singerman emphasized the importance of the visual component:

“This collaboration is a tribute to Motörhead’s legacy and the fans who keep it alive. Lemmy was always fiercely involved in the art behind the band, insisting that it carried the power of the music every step of the way, and being able to see such icons as the War-Pig literally in the hands of the band’s loyal fans is well worth raising a toast to.”

motörhead beer cans 2

More Than Just a Beer

Each Road Crew release will also include a custom Spotify playlist, adding another collectible layer to the experience. These playlists will feature:

  • Classic Motörhead tracks
  • Covers by other artists paying tribute
  • Podcasts exploring the band’s history

This multimedia approach transforms each release into a mini time capsule celebrating the band’s cultural impact.

A Series Built for Fans

BevNomad plans to continue releasing new collectible cans throughout 2026 and beyond, carefully selecting album artwork with historical relevance. With limited availability in select markets, the series is positioned to become a must-have for Motörhead fans and collectors alike.

Whether you’re drawn by the artwork, the music, or simply the novelty of a rock-and-roll-inspired brew, the Road Crew series brings a little Motörhead attitude to the craft beer world.

In true Motörhead fashion, it’s designed to be enjoyed loud — and collected forever.

Design and Innovation

Eye On Design: Unknown Pleasures Album Cover Art

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Unknown Pleasures Cover Art

Photo By Gail

This poster by Peter Savile, who first came to prominence for his designs for Factory Records, was issued to promote Joy Division’s 1979 debut album, Unknown Pleasures.  Band member Bernard Sumner found the image, a rendering of successive waves emitted by a pulsar, in an astronomy textbook.  Saville reversed the image from black-on-white to white-on-black, conjuring the darker atmospherics of the album’s sound. The Cover Art design has attained an iconic status, particularly of late, going so far as to spawn the term “joyplot,“ which refers to a method of data visualization that involves the layering of successive and comparative histograms.

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit, Too Fast To Live Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics at the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC.

Music, Pop Culture

Video Clip of The Week: WARGIRL, “How You Feel”

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When a song instantly conjures a mental movie, on whose soundtrack it fits perfectly, from the very first time you can hear it, that song possesses a cinematic quality that’s been missing from music since the seventies. Just being serious. The transcendent power of the one-song soundtrack hit me as soon as I watched this week’s video clip, “How You Feel” from the southern California-based, mixed-gender sextet, WARGIRL. Blending sixties psychedelia together with seventies funk until it is oh, so smooth, “How You Feel” could have been lifted from a key scene in almost any early James Bond thriller, or perhaps something a bit more exotic, such as Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. If reading that sentence doesn’t get you excited to hear this band, you are dead from the neck up and there is no hope for you. Visually, the accompanying video is a Mondrian-esque, color-block title sequence to that very same movie in your head. It’s two minutes and thirty-five seconds of pure, cinematic perfection.

Comprised of guitarist Matt Wignall, lead singer Samantha Park, bassist Tamara Raye, keyboardist Enya Preston, and dual percussionists Erick Diego Nieto and Jeff Suri, the various members’ diverse backgrounds allow WARGIRL to effortlessly cross and combine genres. I know it’s often said, but WARGIRL truly is a band that sounds like no other, and that’s a very good thing. “How You Feel” can be found on WARGIRL’s self-titled debut album, which is due out on April 19th, 2019! Enjoy!

Wargirl Album Cover Art

Music, Pop Culture

Video Clip of The Week: Swervedriver, “Spiked Flower”

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‘Transcendent’ is not a world that I find myself using very often these days when talking about modern music, if I talk about it at all. I looked at the Billboard charts a couple months ago for the first time in probably a decade — just being serious — and when I realized that every band or artist in the top 20 or so positions on that chart was either someone I’ve never heard of, or someone I am familiar enough with to have a strong distaste for their songs, I knew l’d made the right decision to abandon rock journalism and start writing about art and food. Because I would rather listen to The Beatles or Led Zeppelin for one hundred million billion years than any of the boring, shitty, derivative, eardrum excoriating garbage that ‘the kids’ are downloading for 15 minutes. Fuck the kids.
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