I think all covers from 1967 to 1981 are very good. Seventh Sojourn is a particular favorite of mine.
I don't mind any of the album covers. But, perhaps because the later albums were being released when I was a kid, I like those covers best. The Present is my favorite. I love the original painting it's based on (Daybreak by Maxfield Parrish), and I love the Moodies' take on it, with a spaceship included and, I believe there's even a pterodactyl too lol. I also like the covers of The Other Side of Life and Keys of the Kingdom; they're both so colorful and look great on display.
Count me as a fan of their covers through LDV. When I was first discovering them I looked at the inside photo on Threshold and thought the band members looked like middle aged dentists. But, you know, hip dentists. And not everything Hipnosis did was great. They even mocked up a baboon's butt as a cover idea for DSOTM. Luckily the band chose the one we all know instead.
I really like that one: I don't know why they put it out with a different color a few decades back: I seem to draw a parallel between Roger Dean's artwork and Progressive Rock. When one has the other, they're both elevated. I think Phil Travers (the guy who did the Moodies' covers) captured that psychedelic feeling as well as Roger Dean, or Hipgnosis for the thread's matter.
I love the covers for Days of Future Passed, On the Threshold of a Dream, and Long Distance Voyager. Some of the others are pretty cool, too. Just not Keys to the Kingdom or December.
They're OK. I really liked them at the time but they look a bit dated now. Nazareth is a band that sold me on the LP covers. I bought Raz-Ama-Naz strictly because the cover looked hot. The music .... eh. OK, I guess.
Wow. Only DOFP among the core seven? I think that is the least attractive of the bunch. I like it, mind you, but I love most of the rest. They are everything a great album cover should be.... interesting artwork in and of themselves and evocative of the music contained within. And while in a very different vein, the Long Distance Voyager cover is bloody brilliant.
Hipgnosis is highly overrated, especially for their later covers. The cover of CL+5 in thread 17 follows in this vein.
Cover art, when used well, can be an important part of a band's branding. Roger Dean for Yes, Hipgnosis for Pink Floyd, and Philip Travers for the Moody Blues' Core Seven period were all very important to establishing a consistent visual style for those groups' albums. It would not improve any of those bands' albums to go back and replace the cover art with something else. I love the Dean painting on Gentle Giant's Octopus, but in terms of visual branding, the painting and its associated Dean-designed band logo made it seem like someone was trying to make it look like a Yes album. Hipgnosis was great up until the late '70s. They were really distinctive and there was a lot of variety in their work, so using Hipgnosis didn't automatically make your record look like a Pink Floyd album (e.g. Al Stewart's Past Present & Future, Modern Times, Year of the Cat, and Time Passages -- all Hipgnosis, but nothing like Floyd, and not even particularly similar to each other). But by the end of the '70s it seemed like Hipgnosis was doing more album covers than anyone else, and their work began to seem lazy -- they did the same sort of surrealistic photographic collages over and over, and it just got kind of boring seeing that same visual sensibility on everyone's albums. Philip Travers wasn't a great artist, but he was good at coming up with images that worked on Moody Blues albums. The one for In Search of the Lost Chord has to be one of the great faux-profound paintings of all time -- foetus on the left representing the start of life, skull on the right representing its end, and in between the meditating figure that seems to blossom upward to become a face in the sun, with multiple pairs of arms outstretched to either side. It seems to mean so much more than it really does that it's actually the perfect representation of a Moody Blues album. I like the Moodies (I own all their albums from The Magnificent Moodies up to The Present), but they were never really deep, just good at seeming to be if you didn't think too much about it, just like this painting.
Did you know there was a lawsuit that forced them to change the original cover of A Question of Balance? Scroll down the page just a touch for the story. Album: "A QUESTION OF BALANCE" (1970) - Moody Blues: Traveling Eternity Road (tapatalk.com)
I really like On The Threshold of a Dream (apart from Send Me No Wine) but the Moodies were never all that hip when it came to the visual aesthetics of the more progressive sides of rock music. They were more like the Bee Gees or Hollies but with Psychedelic add-ons. The closest comparison among the Prog community might be Barclay James Harvest but they didn't have the virtuoso showmanship of their peers and you couldn't really see anyone leaving and forming a band like Argent or Greenslade or ELP. The artwork and especially the band promo photos kind of reflected that. They came off more as popular entertainers than rock n rollers. They looked more like young professionals in their weekend-wear. Not a criticism. Just an observation as to where they stood in that 71-75 period when the monsters of progressive music were making their mark.
Not all Hipgnosis covers had artwork that worked. I have no problem with any of the Moody Blues’ covers, up to and including Long Distance Voyager. Most of them complement the atmosphere of the music very well. Of course after that the music gets a bit iffy, so the cover becomes less relevant. The DOFP cover is a bit of a mess I suppose, but it’s still interesting as a piece of abstract art. The Question of Balance cover is a wonderful piece of psychedelia. I also like the fact that the Moody Blues covers have their own style. Roger Dean is a great artist, do ‘t get me wrong, but I used to get a bit tired of seeing so many albums looking like Yes albums, with music that was nothing like Yes. Of course I don’t blame him, it was his living and he was perfectly entitled to take any commission.
No surprises that I love their covers... Decca were taking a few liberties with the Yantra, a direct lift from John Woodroofe's (aka Athur Avalon) books Principles of Tantra (that one of the band was reading at that time) but quite possibly a design going back into history. I always felt that David Anstey's Day of Future Passed was similar to the Beatles - Collection of Beatles Oldies.
I remember the fuss at the time. Blashford-Snell used to write the odd article for Guns Review (a very English shooting magazine) so I was aware of who he was. I rushed off to my copy of AQOB and there he was, causing the Streisand Effect before it even had a name! My later CD and SACD have the generic character painted in instead.
I thought that the artwork was great up to The Present album. They imparted a sense of mystery about the music and the band. It was their shtick. Yes had Roger Dean, Genesis dabbled with surreal British imagery, and Pink Floyd had Hipgnosis.
