Books you can judge by their covers.

Scorpions - "Blackout"

So there I was sat here in the realm of Eminent Silence on a rare week off work, flicking through some album cover artbooks and internet sites and "ping", an idea formed.  There are lots of great album covers out there in the history of music that artists have (quite rightly) received accolades and praise for.  However, the thing I always hated as a kid was picking up a record and it's cover art promised the sound of hell opening or orcs fighting dragons in a fiery pit of damnation, only to find once I got home that the bulk of the songs were about broken hearts and endless tears, instead of broken swords and endless rivers of blood!

So, as part of a new series on my still fledgling blog I am going to champion the albums whose content was every bit as good as the artwork suggested, whose cover image was representative of what lay inside.  The series will start with Scorpions and "Blackout".

Lets look at what we have here.  A screaming man (not unlike Rudolf Schenker himself) with forks bent over his eyes with a head bandage on - possibly the source of his scream?? - shattering a pane of glass with the sheer intensity of his cries.  When you put this album on that's what you want the songs to do, come screaming out of your speakers like a creature in pain and shatter every window in the house.  Straight away you get the title track racing out at you like a horse on fire thinking the other side of the speakers is a lake and this pace keeps up throughout the record - especially on tracks "Now!" and "Dynamite".  The album is perfectly weighted as by the time you get to closing track "When The Smoke Is Going Down" you get a genuine sense that the pain of Rudy(?) on the front has been expunged and all will be well until you next put the record on when again the fury of pent up pain and anger will once more leap forth into your ears.

For a metal lover like me "Blackout" is a perfect piece of album artwork and is rivaled only by the content it so accurately portrays that sits behind it's sleeve/case just waiting to be let out.


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