Gorilaz: Case Study

My Second case study for the CD cover and album art is the Gorillaz: Demon Days. The layout of the album cover is a take on The Beatles album cover for Let it be and this theme was continued for the album art for, Every planet we reach is dead! The way they are standing is the same positions from the album cover “HELP!” I feel that this connotes that the Gorillaz think that they are either The Beatles of this generation or that The Beatles inspire their music. There is also a simple use of text to at the top and bottom of the cover to compliment the simplicity of the cover.

On the back cover is the track list in the same font as the album cover to the left, there is also corporate jargon at the bottom as well as the Gorillaz website. There is also another picture of the Gorillaz on the right hand that is focus of the back. Unlike the cover and a lot of the album art, this image does not connote anything.

 

The CD has ellipsis of the Gorillaz from the cover. I feel that this image follows up on my idea of the Gorillaz-Beatles connotation. I also like how this keeps with the simplicity of the album cover and back cover. The text going round the outside of the CD is again more corporate jargon; the only relevant text to the consumer is the Gorillaz logo at the top of the CD. 

The album art is very different to that of the simplicity of the album front and back cover by being bold and all very different from each other. Each piece of album art is one of the tracks on the album and all of them connote something to do with the song or album as a whole. I feel that the most powerful images from there collection of album art are O Green World and Dirty Harry. The art for O Green World is of a landfill site with the song’s title at the top. The message put across by this image and the song is that the idea of a green planet is leaving us. Dirty Harry connotes that the need for a gun in America is not needed at all and that giving the general public weapons to protect them self is actually causing them more harm. By naming the song after the Client Eastwood, character “Dirty” Harry Callahan that was a shoot first and question later kind of cop well known for not shying away from killing criminals. 

The skill that I will be taking from this case study is that the album art should not only be good to look at but should also have some kind of reference to the song. This will be very good for my group’s song in particular because of the amount of metaphors involved in the lyrics. Another skill that I have learned from this case study is that a simple CD image can be just as effective as a complex image. So for my group’s CD image I will be trying to push forward the idea of a simple image.