Picked up my boxes (CD & Vinyl) today. No flimsiness with my sleeves.
Matrix message on
ALL FIVE VINYLS (!) is...."
CUTS? AXE THE MONARCHY"...see what he did there?...
The CD box has a 12 page booklet with lyrics simply & beautifully presented (sans song titles) on odd pages, while the 5 even pages have the same image of Big Ben at 2:09pm, with each successive image getting lighter until the last shot is almost all grey. Zero Arndale.
The LP has the disc in a polythene U-bag with full lyrics printed, again simply & classically, on a separate innerbag.
To see the full lyrics presented on one 12" square slab, as a continuous piece of text, no song titles to separate, is quite...moving, actually. To read those words, all at once, once again, is to remember what it was to be alive and dieing in the last century.
The rest of the studio sleeves are a Feast of Alain, with various slight variants of the Fallen Delon.
'
artwork by esteban and darren'!
í am slightly disappointed by the absence of any colour. í get that the monochrome image is more classical, and there isn't really any colour of text that would work well, other than white. But they seem to have applied an almost newsprint-dot effect on the new sleeve which just makes it softer and less powerful. í would have hoped that with modern digital repro techniques they could have really brought out more drama from the original MGM source image. But if anything they've gone in the opposite direction.
The original had beautiful grain (see below) that almost elevated it to the level of painting.
Strangley, the cover of the quaintly-named '
Additional Recordings' double album, has a better quality variant image of Delon than the '2017 Master' cover.
í do mourn the dear old Pantone 350C/197C combo.
But even if they wanted a change, í always thought this version (for a proposed press ad/fly poster) looked lovely ~
~ imagine that with pillarbox red text
.
