Galen brought home some copies of the brand new Aaargh Annual compilation (Year One: 2006).
It’s packed with Victoria music: a full 76 minutes. All twenty songs are solid, although the track order is a bit disjointed. The Raygun’s dancepunk stylings are followed by Himalayan Bear’s dreamy Hawaiian guitar, as an example of both the quality and the randomness.
Elephant Island contributed one previously unreleased song, which I just uploaded for your internet audio pleasure.
I am really stuck on the package design, though! It’s cloth bound, which is rare and satisfying. On our copies, the screenprinting is a little patchy, but the version I saw for sale at Ditch looked just dandy.
The design is all antique woodcut ornaments and decorative italics, and for once that style seems meaningful and appropriate instead of just fashionable. The excessively fancy, textural, handmade-looking packaging shows the love that went into this compilation. Perfect.
I had two moments of happiness brought on purely by design details. It reminded me of Stefan Sagmeister’s talk at the last AIGA conference (I wasn’t there; I just listened to some of the podcasts). It’s easy to design things that are funny or beautiful, but objects that create happiness are a lot harder. Here’s what made me happy in this package:
The barcode has bird silhouettes cut out of it. This is a very pretty way to subvert the most commercial part of the package, as well as taking the super-loving fanciness to the max. Also just the idea of putting shapes in the barcode is delightful; I’ve never seen that before.
The CD tray is not the usual centre-attachment kind. It clips at the edges, and the face of the tray has this ridiculous ownership label like a Little Golden Book.
On a different CD package, this could have been a pointless bit of pop cultural nostalgia and evidence of my least favourite kind of hipsterism: obsession with immaturity. But these compilations are distinguishable objects, each with slightly different printing and glue. Labelling each with a name makes sense, like a hand-numbered edition, but more personal.
The Aaargh website seems to be just starting out, and I can’t find anything online about the designers, Upstart Empire, but the Aaargh Annual 2006 is definitely for sale at Ditch Records here in Victoria, along with another recent, local compilation that looks equally jam-packed, Cavalcade of the Scars from Self Righteous Records.
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