I don’t know when this record was released – the sleeve or insert doesn’t offer any hard information. Why can’t these people include the correct information for efficient record-keeping, eh, eh?
In fact, it’s very likely that the year of release could in fact be printed on the rear of the foldover sleeve, but the type on there is so eye-wateringly, brain-splittingly tiny that it’s hard to tell. Well; in all honesty, I’m being slightly facetious. It’s not like the type is unreadable (and I’d never want to come across as one of those dimwits who looks over a piece of design and whose only comment is ‘urrr can’t the text be bigger?’ – that comes just behind ‘I’m not really sure about the colourrrrDUH’ in the whydon’tyouhavearealopinionandwhycan’tyouseebeyondtheendofyournose annoyance stakes). The combination of small type size and swash-heavy script typeface, however, does result in much of the text being just on the right side of challenging to decipher. Maybe that’s the point of this sleeve, though? From the photography on the front and the back, which seems deliberately hazy, washed out and overexposed, to the small type size, and the printing of everything onto a lessen-the-contrast-even-further shade of yellow paper, it seems that perhaps a general feeling of woozy vagueness is being created on purpose. According to some of the microscope-friendly rear sleeve text, the design is by Christopher Douglas @ Flypaper. A cursory glance through Google results suggests one of the following things:
- Christopher Douglas and/or Flypaper have no presence on the internet.
- Christopher Douglas and/or Flypaper now operate in spheres outside of design – perhaps a businessman, an author, or even as simply the title of a movie.
Who knows? Wurlitzer Jukebox was always like this, in their presentation as much as the music contained within their releases: vague, enigmatic and a momentary glimpse of something that proved difficult to capture.
