Genesis album covers

  • I like the CAS cover. Very cool vibe IMO, and the black with blue works well.


    I don't mind the artwork on the WCD cover, the image and the pastel shades... but that's such a terrible album title, and it doesn't fit with the art at all. And then there's that hideous logo they started using at that time, the worst one they ever had - it looks like a child made it. And then they used it again in later years! Why on earth would they splash that eyesore on the green and blue boxed sets? The green one should have been the Nursery Cryme/Foxtrot logo, and the blue one could have been either Trick or the Seconds Out/ATTWT logo. Would have made the series look so much cooler on the shelf, instead of five boxes with giant WCD logos on them.

    I agree about the logo on WCD, it's pretty bad. I don't mind the title, it's not great but I heard a contender for the title was Moments In Time, which would've been by some distance the absolute worst album title not just by them, but by any band. It would be a good title for one of those horrible limp commercial mood music albums, with a TV advert featuring soft-focus images of loving couples, flickering fireplaces, green valleys and rowboats bobbing on lakes.

    Abandon all reason

  • Least favorite: Invisible Touch


    Favorite: Hmm... let's say A Trick Of The Tail.

    I might have to go with you on IT but that and the two that follow form for me a trio of album cover rubbishness.


    In line with it being my favourite album The Lamb is my favourite cover. Like the album itself I like that it stands out quite jarringly from the others. Of the studio albums I think it's the only one consisting of photo images other than ATTWT. I realise Trespass is a photo but it doesn't 'function' as such, if that makes sense.

    Abandon all reason

  • My favourites are Foxtrot, Wind & Wuthering & Abacab. I do like the WCD cover & title.


    My least favourite by a long way is IT. It looks so cheap. I don't like the Lamb cover or ATTWT much either.

  • I love the classic covers: Trespass, Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England, Trick of the Tail, I also like Wind and Wuthering and And Then There Were Three.

    The Lamb qualifies for one of the worst, other than that I'd go for Abacab as the one cover I like least. All the others I'm neutral about, I like the WCD cover though.

  • The thread made me think about the covers and my personal appreciation or dislike of them:


    Trespass: Quite nice, a period cover no doubt but compelling, colors are nice and it certainly draws one's attention

    NC: Victorian, morbid. again quite nice


    Foxtrot: Extremely busy but that was sort of a given in those days, my least favorite of the 5-man era. I'd have to agree with Phil on this one; it doesn't even look particularly professional.


    SEBTP: quite the improvement and very much suits the music.


    The Lamb; I don't hate it but it doesn't do much for me. I can see what they wanted to achieve but I don't find it particularly compelling.


    Trick: My favorite, very tasteful, suits the music perfectly. Dickensian.


    Wind: Again, very tasteful and quite beautiful


    ATTW3: I simply don't like it, never have. Particularly disappointing after the previous two covers


    Duke: excellent imo.


    Abacab: Bad!

    Shape: Worse

    IT: The Worst. It's like they stopped caring at this point. This one is particularly tasteless imo

    WCD: a vast improvement over the previous three. The logo is plainly ugly.

    CAS: Not bad, nice colors. I can take it or leave it but it's not aesthetically offensive like IT, Abacab or Shapes.

    Edited once, last by Fabrizio ().

  • I don't particularly like the Paul Whitehead ones. Trespass isn't too bad, the knife slash is a nice touch.


    SEBTP is a huge improvement, lovely dreamlike quality.


    Trick and Wind are just about okay. I find the colour schemes of each more interesting than the actual graphics.

    Trick: My favorite, very tasteful, suits the music perfectly. Dickensian.

    That's not a word I'd associate with that album.


    Three is better, I Iike the dramatic sky and the fact there are actual people. I find the cover more interesting than most of the music. Duke is too cutesy and winsome for my liking. Abacab I like a lot and especially liked the different versions available on its original release, and the somewhat grim simplicity of the lyric-less inner sleeve. I totally get why Shapes is so disliked but I have no problem with the image itself. However, the title typeface is appallingly bad, and the way the shapes are carried through as icons for individual tracks is lame beyond belief. That album cover is one crying out to have no text on the front, just the shapes.


    And as I said, I think the remaining three are crap.

    Abandon all reason

    Edited once, last by Backdrifter ().

  • What about the live albums. Here, I think they pretty much abandoned any attempt to be creative in any way as they are uniformly dull and unimaginative. In that sense, for me the best of a boring bunch is 3SL. Sure it's pretty uninteresting but its starkness kind of makes a statement about where they were at that time. I really liked the approach of having just one big fuzzy pic. It was a pleasing contrast to the previous live album with its predictable montage/scrapbook style that was ploddingly typical of 70s double live rock albums.

    Abandon all reason

  • Dickensian in the sense that some of the lyrics have a 19th century feel to them, most obviously Robbery, Assault & Battery but also the title track & Entangled. Even Mad Man Moon has a 'period piece' feel to it. At least I hope that's what Fabrizio meant.

  • What about the live albums. Here, I think they pretty much abandoned any attempt to be creative in any way as they are uniformly dull and unimaginative. In that sense, for me the best of a boring bunch is 3SL. Sure it's pretty uninteresting but its starkness kind of makes a statement about where they were at that time. I really liked the approach of having just one big fuzzy pic. It was a pleasing contrast to the previous live album with its predictable montage/scrapbook style that was ploddingly typical of 70s double live rock albums.

    Genesis had a spectacular stage and light show and the album covers reflected that.

    Unimaginative?

    Perhaps.

    Dull?

    Absolutely not.

    I recall walking into a record store in the late 70s and seeing a display island of about a dozen or so albums and my focus lured like a magnet to that image with the cyan blue curtain in the background and that bizarre character standing behind a bass drum in the middle of the stage with that red headpiece and glowing eyes..

    Personally, I love that cover.

  • Dickensian in the sense that some of the lyrics have a 19th century feel to them, most obviously Robbery, Assault & Battery but also the title track & Entangled. Even Mad Man Moon has a 'period piece' feel to it. At least I hope that's what Fabrizio meant.

    It was. Thanks. Some of the drawings: the children, the nurse, the barrister, the thief seem to come straight from a Dickens book.

    Edited once, last by Fabrizio ().

  • I get what you mean about Live, I can see the scenario you describe. Personally I find the back cover more interesting. Seconds Out is terrible though, a completely pointless shot of a dramatic moment in the show that conveys absolutely none of its dynamism. The simpler, more 'mysterious' rear cover image would've been much better. Trying to reflect their stage show on an album cover like that is, to borrow from Hugh Fielder, like trying to go water-skiing in the bath. The inner cover image in 3SL works really well as it's so much more dynamic and much closer to conveying what an audience member would see.


    In a way the pristine lifeless cover shot of Seconds Out reflects the very crisp clinical feel of the album.

    Abandon all reason

  • Trick is an easy favourite, I used to have a photocopy of it as a poster in my bedroom. I also have a soft spot for Justin Hayward's "Songwriter" cover, same artist Colin Elgie, same idea, every song illustrated, but completely different end result.

    SEBTP is great too, I remember seeing a poster sized copy in a record shop in '73, even though I had no idea who Genesis were at the time. It made an impact.

    Lamb is also great, after that, it all goes a bit downhill, sadly.

    Ian


    Putting the old-fashioned Staffordshire plate in the dishwasher!

  • I've always loved the simplicity of We Can't Dance and Wind And Wuthering. Beautiful artwork and both quite moving in their own way. The cover for W&W is especially interesting because it does a great job of conveying the mood of the whole album.


    Least favourite would be Trespass, I think.

  • I love Trespass! I used to study the lp version for hours and I always thought the cover matched the music too.


    I also love the cover for 'Shapes' and 'Abacab' too.

    "She looks at me and gently smiles, as if she knew I'd ask her all the time..."