jonathan jones's favorite album covers

The album cover is one of my favorite art forms, the place where my twin passions for design and music intertwine.  Art critic Jonathan Jones recently collected some of his favorites for the Guardian and freely admits that he has a long-standing habit of buying an album for the cover art alone.  He takes the Fleet Foxes and their use of Bruegel the Elder as an example of what grabs him:

As for Fleet Foxes, the thrill of their cover is that it ignores all convention and fashion - instead of a designer image here is raw art. It is a classic, and so is the recording inside.

Though Jones skews heavily toward Pink Floyd in his choices he does include one of Peter Saville's Joy Division covers, and Saville's work on the Factory releases was an integral part of what got me sucked into the Manchester sound myself back in the day.  4AD's album covers have been consistently gorgeous for almost 30 years now, while the out-of-focus solarized ballerinas on Belly's Star define the entire mid-nineties for me.  Probably my favorite cover of all time though is Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, which I loved well before I even knew who Gerhard Richter was.  Funny how all these things come together for me in the end.