Anal Bum Cover

In my continuing efforts to provide fluffy filler content for this blog and procrastinate from doing any actual law school studying I decided to take a crack at an interesting little "meme" I caught a few weeks back. Now normally I really don't go for such things considering that I still refuse to put any of those new fangled "applications" on my relatively spartan Facebook profile, I haven't done an internet quiz since I was a freshman in high school, and I heard so many analyses of memes during my Communications undergrad days that it makes me sick just to think too long about them; but hey I do enjoy dicking around on Photoshop.

The way it goes is:

1. You click on the Wikipedia Random Article page. Whatever result you get is your band/artist name.
2. Click on the Random Quotes page at the Quotations Page. The last four words of the very last quote on the page will be your album title.
3. Now head on over to Flickr and click on the "interesting photos from the last seven days" section. The first picture is your album cover.
4. Take all those elements and slap them together in Photoshop (or I guess MS Paint if you're keeping it old school) and you've got yourself an album cover that William Burroughs would have been proud of!

The results were actually at times eerily genuine. Frankly I don't know why bands even bother with graphic designers and artists when a few clicks, crops, and prudent font selection will give them just as good a cover. Here are the four I came up with:

I can totally see "Union Bay" as a modern day, post-grunge hard rock band, which in short means they probably suck. At best they might be like Live, at worst Nickelback. "Temper" would probably contain a baker's dozen of straight ahead crunching guitars and Eddie Vedder-like vocals form a bunch of indistinguishable long haired white guys (possibly from Florida). The songs would cover all the staples: screeching anthems about broken relationships, problems with the bottle, and finding the the strength to do something. All in all, they'd be derided by critics, however sell at least a million copies (which no one will admit to owning), top the modern and mainstream rock charts for about 40 weeks, and further contribute to the death of rock.

"Concreatism" seems like a fairly established electronica music group. They'd be one of those big beat bands that came out of the Ecstasy-fuel British rave culture of 90s, except they're Australian. They had their heydays about a decade before this release and even a fluke mainstream hit which makes people in this country who are not into the electronica scene classify them as one hit wonders. "Morning" looks like the long awaited release after a tumultuous period of change in the group (although about 90% of the work is done by one guy). It'll be hailed as a return to form and sell just enough albums for them to make another album.

This is definitely my favorite image of the four. "Atwood, Colorado" which happens to be where the group hails from seems like one of those irreverent, somewhat subversive, indie folk rock bands. It may possibly be all girl or at least half girls. I'd probably find them annoying and untalented a la Moldy Peaches. That being said I'm sure any of the songs from "...Is That" would fit like a glove within the Juno soundtrack. A fine collection of sparse, acoustic, lo-fi songs about young love, kissing, living in New York, candy wrappers, or whatever they're looking at as they hastily write a song. I'm sure you can preview all of them on their well maintained MySpace page.

Aside from the somewhat out of place artist name, this was probably the best combination that randomly came up. Alekseev seems to be to a Russian version of Mike Skinner. You could possibly assume that his name is a pseudonyms. He probably came originally from the rough streets of Moscow, then settled in England and established himself with a string of highly regarded singles. Amid a mountain of hype and buzz his debut "Impossible" becomes a critical smash and gets nominated for the Mercury Prize. Although nobody knows what the hell he's saying on the album, it all sounds fresh and interesting nevertheless. Elitist, above mainstream rap/hip hop fans in America find pretentious joy in introducing their friends to it.