Above this Fire is a melodic hardcore band that I’ve played bass in since 2003. We’ve put out a number of releases, and technology has done a lot of damage in regard to the sales of actual CD’s, especially in our genre of heavy music. We needed to give people a reason to actually want to buy the physical album instead of buying it through iTunes or downloading it, so this was a perfect opportunity to go all out on an album package. The name “Last Ones” comes from the fact that most of the bands that we’ve been friends with have broken up.
After hours upon hours of concepting, I came up with the idea of having a die-cut graphic and liner notes as individual sheets so that people can create their own record cover through re-ordering the liner notes behind the die-cut. From there, I came up with the concept of using our equipment as the focus of the package. Our gear is beat up, but it has great character. We built the piles of gears (none of that is photo-shopped) and laid instrument cables all over so that the gear piles seem like a ruin, or a battlefield right after a fight ended. – Oliver Barrett
Each sheet of the liner notes has an image on one side and the lyrics on the other. Some of the images are photos taken by band members, and others are abstracted graphics. We had the liner notes packaged in a random order so that the viewer would have to interact with the package to put them in the right order behind the die-cut graphic to suggest the idea of making a unique album cover. The lyric side of the liner notes have the track numbers on it so that the viewer can easily put the sheets in the correct order.
I heavily drew inspiration for the tones of the album from vintage jazz records, specifically Blue Note records. I gave the package a faux vintage feel through yellowing the images, slightly distressing the edges, adding a faux-record indentation on each sheet, and printing on matte paper. The actual disc itself is a faux vinyl lp. I also took some elements directly from those Blue Note album covers, one example is the display of the album’s musicians in nearly every place that the band name appears.
My favorite part of the project was building the piles of musical equipment. Actually setting up and directing the photo-shoot for the layout was something new to me. Being able to have complete control over every aspect of this project yielded great results that I hope will show our clients what we’re capable of when given free reign and a strong concept. We’ve sold quite a few of these albums based on the packaging alone.
