The new edition of What’s In A Cover? features two debut albums by artists that use the cover of those albums to show not only images of themselves but to focus on distorted, twisted images of their faces. What do these images mean? What messages could they convey? Today we look at front covers of John Cale’s Vintage Violence and Jennie Vee’s Spying…
With the silver colour and sharp lines of the futuristic outfit, the closeness of the subject and the nondescript background, Spying seems all set to have a glam pin up style cover. Things aren’t as they appear though as Jennie’s eyes are daubed and listless, her skin pallid and waxy. She’s been dehumanised at best, turned into a commodity at worst. Our expectations are twisted as the glamour setup is used to tell a different story. It’s like a cover to a Roxy Music album, but with the messages of image, style and marketing heightened with post-punk conceptions of seeing the truth behind the presented picture, like when considering the front and back of ABC’s Lexicon Of Love.
The album title, Spying, which comes from one of the tracks, is an odd one. Why Spying? Things take an eery turn when we realise that we are looking at Jennie, but Jennie is not looking at us. We are the ones doing the spying, and she knows. We are caught in an act of voyeurism. It’s an act of communication between artist and listener rendered strongest when Ian Curtis beckoned us into the ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ on the opener of Closer. We commit the new atrocities and the artist are the ones who tried hard to succeed. The result? The cover of Spying tells us. We can in turn compare Jennie in this image to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a 21st century spin on the depiction of disconsolation for the instagram age.
The situation becomes even more startling when we compare this with the photo of Jennie from the cover of the EP Die Alone. There she’s like a Dickensian character; a waif in the big city. Die Alone and Spying act like before and after images. Between them they contain a narrative for us to digest before the music has even begun.
Buy Spying and all of Jennie’s back catalogue at…
https://jennievee.bandcamp.com
Meanwhile, on Cale’s Vintage Violence, the man himself covers his face under a creepy glass mask.
Let us not think of the function of the mask as to conceal, after all, we know it’s Cale, and his name’s on the album. So if the mask isn’t to hide, maybe it’s to lock / freeze. This is a more tempting idea as the result is closer to Dante’s death mask than the hockey mask which would come later. Cale’s face is embalmed for eternity, frozen in youth and ambivalence, but the result is a chilling one. The most prominent part, the eyes, as ever the window to the soul.
And what of the title, Vintage Violence? Lets see this as the young Cale reconciling the already paradoxical nature of his career. The “Vintage” reflecting his classical training and the “Violence” his avant garde work and input to the Velvet Underground. As his solo career grew wings, Cale was already broadcasting the creative tension that would dominate his work. The music of Vintage Violence would lean towards the “Vintage” with it’s folky melodies and lush arrangements that would pave the way for the orchestral manoeuvres of Paris 1919. But, as ever with Cale, uglinness hides below the beauty, and violence lurks behind the calm; China under fire and a menagerie of grotesqueries dominate the lyrical worldview.
Vintage Violence, and the rest of John Cale’s superlative back catalogue is available just about everywhere, buy it all!
Read review of Spying and Die Alone
Read the previous What’s In A Cover? featuring Marquee Moon and So Alone.
colourhorizon 