So yeah, I get that people who own vinyl are better than me. They probably even eat, like, sandwiches that don’t have bread on them, and all that stuff. But believe it or not, vinyl still only accounted for 14% of total sales of physical music last year, you can only fit 40 minutes worth of stuff on it, it offers no sonic advantages in the way of digital album masterings which most LP’s are these days and… you have to get up every 20 minutes to flip that unwieldy thing over, somehow coordinating that unyielding metallic needle with that fragile, spinning object. Sort of makes rewinding VHS’s look like a piece of cake, doesn’t it?
In other words, I’m treating the situation as if this vinyl craze is a “fad,” soon to pass, believe it or not. And at this point I don’t think anybody expects CD’s to make a comeback, as reportedly Best Buy will not be selling them anymore and my beloved Circuit City has been down for the count for 10+ (yeah I mean only 89 million were sold in 2017, what a has-been). What this spells out then, I guess, is an impending end of physical music altogether (what could be more fittingly obnoxious), and thereby, THEORETICALLY the end of the “album cover.”
But… REMEMBER THOSE INSTANT MESSAGING ICONS. I think there will still be a value in album artwork (of which yes you guessed it per the reason why I’m writing this post Jim James’ Eternally Even is stellar stuff). We will still be essentially the same — normal on the outside but twisted on the inside as is paraded so ingeniously be James here on this sort of twisted-psychedelic piece of expressionist self-portraiture with some good ol’ blood-a** red in the background.
As for the album itself, it’s pretty good — I especially like “Here in Spirit” and the undying mantra “Go on and dance with the night / Go on be one with the night / Full of life”, which is basically just a verbal consolidation of what I thought was the musical message (lyrics irrespective) within the band’s best work such as Z. But don’t tell Consequence of Sound that Z is MMJ’s best album, they’re too cool for that, even though right after crowing It Still Moves as king they pretend to be puzzled that two years later the band met up with Wilco and Bob Dylan for some shows. For the record, Z scored a 90 on Metacritic and It Still Moves an 83.