✌ we never polled the steely dan album art ✌

Katy Lied.

can't buy a thrill, easy.

mostly terrible tbh, exceptions being aja, katy lied, pretzel logic

Katy Lied, with Pretzel logic running in second. Aja is okay. Then, ugh.

i have gaucho framed on my wall

Can't Buy A Thrill.

.. but i like this t shirt

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71ucdADSbWL._SL1186_.jpg

real answer:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c7/Donald_Fagen_-_The_Nightfly.jpg

^^^

yes!!!

pretzel vs katy vs aja for me. gaucho is cool too.

from the Royal Scam reissue liner notes:

"Luckily for us, we are in Los Angeles where, more than anywhere else in the known universe, bad taste abhors a vacuum, and before long we find ourselves staring into the maw of the most hideous album cover of the seventies, bar none (excepting perhaps Can't Buy A Thrill). Why are those buildings turning into reptilian horrors, or vice versa? What squalid back alley of the human condition is meant to be invoked by this contused nightmare palette? What manner of man - ill-shod, unshaven - dares sleep peacefully through this fearsome and repulsive protomorph?"

Katy lied for what I presume is the pun w/ katydid

xp man i need to buy those reissues just for the liner notes!

The only real stinker here is Two Against Nature.

xpost otm. I just got my bonus, i should go buy the whole series right the f now.

I adore the cover to The Royal Scam

Pretzel Logic is the most boring one (I'm not counting those last two at all). The uglier the better imo. They have a great collection of '70s ugliness there. Katy Lied is probably the second most boring, although it's a great photo on its own. Aja is the most classically "good" and iconic design there but it's pretty dull as well. Thrill, countdown, scam, & gaucho all nicely capture different aspects of '70s kitsch, but if I knew nothing about this band at all and had to buy one of the records on looks alone, it would definitely be Can't Buy a Thrill.

xpost i keep reading your damn dn as AMERICA IS ABOUT RIESLING i'm like yeah fuck a gewurz

Not one of my favorite Steely Dan albums, but I can't resist a good collage, so I voted for Can't Buy A Thrill.

love gaucho's cover but i guess i understand objections to it

two against nature's cover is the worst but i guess it explains their last decade of website design

none are as bad as

http://www.pergunnareriksson.se/images/walterbeckerB.jpg

lol that one belongs here
OLD SOCK VS. FORK IN THE ROAD: Which Album Cover Has The Most IDGAF Old Dude Swag

Contrary to popular belief Phil Hartman did not create the cover for Steely Dan's 1977 album Aja

:(

Katy Lied, then Pretzel Logic. I know I'm influenced by my feelings about the music, but I'm pretty sure I'd go with those two anyway. Don't think much of the first two covers.

all the OG 7 covers are pretty cool. Appreciate the garishness of CBAT, I like CTE despite not really knowing wtf it is, PL is not exciting but nice, KL is awesome, TRS gets by on the backstory, Aja is beautiful, gaucho is class. 2AN is like a website homepage, EMG looks like a better than ezra cover from 1997.

on second thought, CTE looks like a classic philip k dick cover

For me it's aja easilly. In a class of its own.

kind of fond of all the original 7 to varying degrees, even if CBAT & RS are ugly a all hell. i guess if i didnt know the band/ records or the contents therein i'd be tempted to go w/ Aja

on second thought, CTE looks like a classic philip k dick cover

otm. I think it's the most fusiony looking cover too. it almost has a '70s ECM vibe. it also feels like the kind of painting that would be hanging in a doctor's office in the '70s or '80s.

i know there's a lot of competition, but their covers are as ugly and ungainly as their music is gorgeous and elegant.

pretzel logic would be an ecm cover if pretzel man and his cart weren't in the photo

pretzel logic looks too billy joel to me

agreed. put BJ behind a food cart with shades and a beanie and he could petty much be that dude (in 2013)

http://www.popspotsnyc.com/pretzel_logic/

but their covers are as ugly and ungainly as their music is gorgeous and elegant.

okay fine but i can't think of a record cover as gorgeous as aja which engenders my good will toward the others, even the hideous ones

guys, guys, guys: there are no hideous or ugly steely dan album covers

I think their music can be kind of ugly and ungainly too and I don't really mean that as a criticism. The covers of CTE, KL and Gaucho are all very carefully and elegantly designed but they use very '70s color palettes and typography that fell out of style in later decades and might read as "ugly" to a lot of people now. they seem to parallel the music really well. Can't Buy A Thrill probably suits their music the least. It's weird how it has this sort of pop art style that was a few years out of date at the time but also anticipates certain punk & new wave collage styles.

guys is the remasters series with the awesome liner notes the '98-00 one or was there another series since then?

YOU BORING CUNTS

showing a katydid bug for your "katy lied" album cover is beyond stupid

xposts: The '98-'00 ones. The notes from the Show Biz Kids set from the next year have an amusing postscript to the Aja notes.

Can't Buy a Thrill: Could almost imagine this as a Zappa cover. It's colourful, I'll give it that.
Countdown to Ecstasy: Yeah I like the sci-fi vibes.
Pretzel Logic: I feel like there was a brief trend for mundane photos on '70s album covers but can't think of any other examples off the top of my head.
Katy Lied: I think this one is the one I'd find most intriguing if I saw it and knew nothing about the band.
Royal Scam: Everything about this is awful.
Aja & Gaucho: Both pretty stylish, I think I'd pick one of these as the best.
Two Against Nature: Boring picture, crappy late-'90s typeface/layout.
Everything Must Go: Looks like an anonymous '00s rock album.

showing a katydid bug for your "katy lied" album cover is beyond stupid

the combination of that photo and the dumb pun seem like they belong on a late '90s IDM record.

it would be spelled katylid and there would be intense debates about how it was meant to be pronounced.

http://www.popspotsnyc.com/pretzel_logic/

This is so cool. Just south of the entrance to the Met.

xposts: The '98-'00 ones. The notes from the Show Biz Kids set from the next year have an amusing postscript to the Aja notes.

― Sheela-Tubb-Mann, You Real Know-It-All (C. Grisso/McCain), Thursday, May 16, 2013 2:33 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sweet. They are fucking cheap on Amazon. I just ordered all 7 for 36 bucks.

Does Show Biz Kids mop up FM and Here at the Western World?

Yeah. No live b-side "Bodhisattva" tho.

um, sorry about that. frustration with bad day + boring ILX led to surf-by shooting. as NV said, it's the threads that don't exist, not those that do. who am I to quibble your choices. :(

It's like every one of those covers is the work of a different style of band - "Thrill" is some Westbound funk band, "Ecstasy" is a great Brit prog band, "Pretzel" is some American singer-songwriter, "Scam" is a crap Brit prog band.

"Katy Lied", just because I can never resist that sort of muddy-green palette.

So she's Asian but what's her nationality?

Israeli

voted for 'katy lied'. 'aja' and 'gaucho' have this sort of iconic feel about them, and i also like the 'countdown to ecstasy' one.

I think I rank them:

TRS
Aja
Gaucho
KL
CTE
PL
CBAT
TAN
EMG

The only one I really like is Pretzel Logic. Katy Lied & Aja are pretty good, & so is Gaucho, except for its fonts, ugh. Can't Buy A Thrill & The Royal Scam are awful.

I get seriously squicked out by mouths that are not attached to faces. So Can’t Buy A Thrill, the Rolling Stones logo, Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, and certain models of fleshlight are just out.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

whoever upthread said "a great collection of '70s ugliness" is kind of onto it

amen. I like "Everything Must Go", it seems to sum up their aesthetic in a way I can't quite place my finger on. Aja and Gaucho are also v. good.

Everything Must Go is dope. especially the color scheme of the text.

EMG is basically an instagram post from anyone vacationing in DC

LOL

Argh, this band not only has a ton of bad cover art, but bad cover art that is ahead of its time -- Pretzel Logic is proto-90s radio-friendly alt rock, Countdown to Ecstasy looks like a Radiohead/Bjork collabo, etc.

Voted for Aja, find that one elegant and it suits the record. Can't Buy a Thrill and Royal Scam are just a mess. Gaucho is so bad I find it endearing.

gaucho because I remember seeing it as a kid and it was the first dan album I ever saw

Countdown To Ecstasy because here they come.

"Pretzel Logic is proto-90s radio-friendly alt rock"

ahah, so true.

Steel Daniel Pilots

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Surprised by Katy coming first. I know a lot of people like it, but I don't really dig it that much.

Good to see a big turnout though!

56 votes for boring, 36 votes for awesome, and 2 trolls.

http://www.popspotsnyc.com/pretzel_logic/

― sons of plutarchy (will), Thursday, May 16, 2013 1:07 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i love this

it's remarkable that a band that were such perfectionists on the music end of things seemed to just not give a fuck - like, at ALL - about the album artwork. Liner notes, sure, but the art = "eh, who cares"

aja is a legitimately great album cover imo, and pretzel logic has its charms.

also think katy lied and gaucho are pretty charming

at this point i only think the reunion records have godawful covers

Countdown to Ecstasy is pretty bad

no

i love that one, it's pretty fuckin cracked

nearly all of this band's album artwork is shit. I like the Aja art, and I also like the Katy Lied art but that's also probably my least favorite Dan album. Gaucho is just incomprehensible to me as a cover, it's hard to think of album art that relates less in content or aesthetic to the music.

come on the gaucho painting would totally be hanging in luxury apartment of someone who's done so much coke they think the walls have eyes

I think the Gaucho art makes sense if you consider it as this sort of fantasy image, considering how many of the tracks are these imagined scenarios in which the narrator tries to mythologize themselves or their situations or even their adversaries, while in the meantime they’re living this empty existence facing down middle age and partying past their sell by date.

i like katy lied, aja, gaucho, pretzel logic, and find the remainder VILE

come on the gaucho painting would totally be hanging in luxury apartment of someone who's done so much coke they think the walls have eyes

― american bradass (BradNelson), Tuesday, December 3, 2019 9:49 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i have gaucho framed on my wall

― gr8080, Thursday, May 16, 2013 5:52 PM (six years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Strong disagree about their album art being shite tbf. Aja cover is a work of art. And so are Gaucho (which makes total sense w/ the music imo) and Katie Lied: all great. I'm with Brad, only the reunion album ones are meh.

katy lied is a good cover for the pun, but the image itself is not my bag

the royal scam artwork is hilariously bad, tho i can't imagine the album without it at this point

i find the picture of the cricket on katy lied to be super ominous and haunting for some reason. it was the first steely dan record i bought for that reason

katy lied beating out aja is probably the most inexplicable thing i've seen from an ilx poll

^^ yep.

royal scam cover makes more sense if you imagine it as a missing scene from the end of ghostbusters

The Royal Scam cover is at least kind of interesting and weird, though also very ugly.

Royal Scam cover was originally made for Van Morrison's unreleased follow-up to Veedon Fleece!

http://www.bigozine2.com/MP307/VMbliss/VMblissFr2.jpg

yeah, that's hella funny. "what do we do with this thing? idk give it to the dan"

I mean, it fits the song pretty well.

xpost woah

Steely Van

https://i.imgur.com/0xfo8mM.jpg

Oh my god...

What a post to return to ilx for <3

gr8080, this isn't the cursed images thread

absolutely not

also coke will kill you before you ever start hallucinating