7. GroundhogsSplit
This is the first of these album covers that’s photographic instead of illustrated. I love this one because of the way it’s manipulated. It looks uniquely strange and it’s got this trippy effect. It looks to me that they cut circles of the same photograph in diminishing sizes and turned each one slightly to create this spiral ripple effect. The process is actually pretty simple. But it creates this very disorienting, psychedelic illusion.
It works with the title of the album, which is about schizophrenia and split personalities. This has a fractured, demented vibe to it. And it also matches the music which is blazing guitar, psychedelic and really charged rock music. The interiors of the vinyl sleeve are also great too, because it’s got a much more subtle effect with the band onstage, but there’s a slight visual delay. There’s two images of each member: the same photo is behind another but slightly off. So there’s a double of each person in the band, but the rest of the background is not that way. It’s a very subtle effect on the interior.
On the cover, you’re looking into the vortex. There’s a tendency to go toward the centre, but you’re also drawn to these cascading eyes that come out of the spiral. It’s impossible to not be drawn to that – human nature wants to take us to the face. And when you do that it goes into this twist. The whole thing looks like if you fractured space and time and captured it in one photograph. This is the motion of how it truly looks when he’s playing. The energy of the wild parts of the music are encapsulated here in this photograph. This rippling effect of feedback and effects and things like that. You can see, you can hear, the soundwave.
