Blue Öyster Cult, Club Ninja, Columbia Records, 1986. Setting the music aside to begin with, just now and again you get an LP sleeve that isn't so much "wrecked" but completely lazy, cliché'd, stereotyped and, well, unimaginative and unoriginal. It's as if a lot of record label money went into not very much at all, and as if it was commissioned from a design studio that's at the opposite end of the scale of excellence from Hipgynosis. It's as if a class of ten year olds were polled and asked what sort of pictures came to mind from the words "Club" and "ninja". So you get the cool spacecraft, a nightclub in orbit, and, on the back cover, a combination of ninja warrior and spaceman, with shuriken throwing star. Whatever drawings that class of ten year olds made were then critically assessed and the best of them was worked up into this LP cover - with all the garish primary colours retained. The questionable "Japanese-style" font was added as an afterthought. While the LP itself is by no means BÖC's worst and has a couple of good tracks, ("Perfect Water" has those breathtakingly brilliant guitar solos from Buck Dharma. "Dancin' In The Ruins" is pretty good, too) it's symptomatic of something having gone from the band - the glory days of "Don't Fear The Reaper" and "Godzilla" behind them and the creativity petering out. Maybe the sleeve is symptomatic of this. In the main, the music is anonymous Eighties background rock, and given what this act were like at their greatest - with some truly amazingly good LP sleeve designs to match - then that's a real shame.
Music eighties hair rock - in a wig factory
Blue Öyster Cult, Club Ninja, Columbia Records, 1986. Setting the music aside to begin with, just now and again you get an LP sleeve that isn't so much "wrecked" but completely lazy, cliché'd, stereotyped and, well, unimaginative and unoriginal. It's as if a lot of record label money went into not very much at all, and as if it was commissioned from a design studio that's at the opposite end of the scale of excellence from Hipgynosis. It's as if a class of ten year olds were polled and asked what sort of pictures came to mind from the words "Club" and "ninja". So you get the cool spacecraft, a nightclub in orbit, and, on the back cover, a combination of ninja warrior and spaceman, with shuriken throwing star. Whatever drawings that class of ten year olds made were then critically assessed and the best of them was worked up into this LP cover - with all the garish primary colours retained. The questionable "Japanese-style" font was added as an afterthought. While the LP itself is by no means BÖC's worst and has a couple of good tracks, ("Perfect Water" has those breathtakingly brilliant guitar solos from Buck Dharma. "Dancin' In The Ruins" is pretty good, too) it's symptomatic of something having gone from the band - the glory days of "Don't Fear The Reaper" and "Godzilla" behind them and the creativity petering out. Maybe the sleeve is symptomatic of this. In the main, the music is anonymous Eighties background rock, and given what this act were like at their greatest - with some truly amazingly good LP sleeve designs to match - then that's a real shame.