The cover of the album (it’s
called Angelic Encounters) must have taken a good deal of work
on the part of Par Johanssen, its artist: it’s a predominantly
blue craggy-mountain-and-cloud landscape with two angels in it. One
of the angels is watching the other fall into the misty abyss below;
there’s a tower down in the valley, probably rising from some
castle or something. In the upper left hand corner
of the sleeve is the band’s logo. All heavy metal bands must
have logos, and Thanatos is no exception; theirs is much more legible
than most, and much rounder. It would look perfectly at home in one
of those late-sixties/early-seventies Pentecostal pamphlets that were
written in then-modern parlance, designed for handing out at protests
and happenings in the hopes that hippies, through cunning use of language
and imagery, could be duped into thinking it was cool
to suddenly abandon the vital cultural movement with with they were
involved and join forces with the enemy. Thanatos has chosen for themselves
a logo that might better suit a band like Phish. At the bottom of
the sleeve, just below the head of the descending angel, the album
title is printed in the plainest of non-serif fonts, almost completely
unnoticeable, devoid of any personality. It’s like a few people
(Johanssen, and whoever designed the logo) put a lot of work into
the sleeve and then handed it over to the layout guy, who figured
it didn’t really matter where the title was placed or what font
it was printed in, so he just went with the defaults. And in a way
our imaginary layout guy is right: the logo, after all, looks intrusive
in the painting, and the painting itself is neither gory nor splendid
enough to hold anybody’s attention long enough to make them curious
about the record. If you passed it while flipping through the “T”
racks in your local record store, the odds’d be against you stopping,
even though two of the three constituent parts of the cover image
strongly suggest that somebody really, really wanted for you to pick
up this record and have a look at it.
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