Thursday 4 April 2013

A unique record cover?

A recent - lucky - find that I have come to treasure is Canadian singer Veda Hille’s Path of a Body, released in 1993 and long out-of-print, but a superb record with amazing contrast and flowing textures that range from hard rock without any pomposity to complex progressive songs like “Rhapsody” and “With No Caring” (for more, see later). Path of a Body is or seems to be a loose concept album about a mother’s pains having a child: Hille was to become much more tightly conceptual - though not more effective - on her later albums, including one produced by XTC’s Andy Partridge.

Perhaps even more unusual than the record itself, though, is the cover, which features on one side the title and - and this is the key - a phonetic representation of “ve|'də hi'lee” “pæθ əv ə ba'di” on the other:
(I had to try this several times because the file was a .tiff file which blogs generally cannot upload). On the original image I misread “caring” and “carving” so that in my initial review for Rate Your Music I wrote about a song “With No Carving” that does not fit the theme of the album! it is probably the first time on iTunes or RYM I have ever done that, and I have written about music for a long time now! I wonder if any of you see how I made the mistake, or if you have seen a cover quite like this one ever before in your life??

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