Judging an Album By Its Cover

One of my favourite things to do in Montreal, apart from pigging out on gastronomical delights, is exploring the used CD shops along St-Denis and Mont Royal. I find when I don't have a particular album I'm looking for I just browse through the cover art and pick up anything that catches my eye. I reason that if the artists' taste for visual design appeals to me, then so must their music.

My first foray into this musical adventuring was in San Francisco when I found the cutest album cover and bought the album solely for the art. It was by a group called Transporter and the sound turned out to be some mellow acid jazz, which was totally up my alley.

Most recently I picked up a Sybris CD, which had a simple line drawing that I thought was quite cute. And for $2.99, how could I go wrong? The first track on the album made me wonder what the heck I had bought — it sounded like some weird space-agey bleeps. Fortunately, the rest of the album was like... the indie band kind of reminds me of a blend between Metric and Bloc Party, and it's pretty darn good.

Other good finds I picked up were Future's Burning, which turned out to be a compilation of British bands like Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, and a white covered-album with only the title The Sound of Music, which when I turned over I found it to be the music of Pizzicato Five (score!) The only bust was an album that had b&w images of a girl surrounded with yellow pattered swirls around her. It looked like a house or electronica album to me, so I tried it out. Popping it in the CD player revealed it to be full of French songs ala Céline Dion, but much more mellow and cheesy. Ah well, you can't win 'em all.