Analysis of Album Front Cover
DragonForce - Ultra Beatdown
The front cover to this album presents it with a distinctly futuristic tone; the background is covered in stars and planets, signifying an element of space travel. The blocks, pixellated effects and angular shapes imply artificiality; a sort of cyberpunk fusion of digital and mechanical elements. The main subject of the picture - the cyborg girl - is covered in augmented machinery and body parts; this is a fusion between artificial and natural (human). Her hair is very animé-like in its color and form, clearly an unrealistic and unnatural coloration - and the fact that it takes the shape of a graphic equaliser symbolises music.
The bright colours are especially unusual for the front cover of a metal album, and makes it stand out as being particularly atypical - the bright colours clash with the dark, grungy, metallic greys of the cyborg’s mechanical elements. With that much colour, it wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a dance album - and this sense of ambiguity surrounding the fact that the front cover doesn’t conform to genre stereotype is instrumental in creating a cross-audience appeal for the music. While the traditional mechanical grunge reels in the metal-heads, its futuristic, technological and electronic stylings appeals to geeks, sci-fi fans and dance music aficionados - audiences who wouldn’t typically be interested in this sort of music.
What’s also interesting is the fact that band are not present on the front cover (though they are depicted through a blurred, pixellated filter on the back); this signifies that they don’t want their own image interfering with the representation of the music, instead using artwork to depict the album in way that doesn’t involve them. It’s worth noting here that most DragonForce songs are almost like stories - and while they inevitably involve some sort of first-person content, it’s exclusively from the eyes of a created character, not from the actual band members. In effect, the band are discarding their own image, as it is effectively inconsequential to the abstract lyrical content of their songs. The imagery represents the songs more than the band themselves ever could, in terms of both the meanings of the lyrics, (which are hardly the height of deep introspection) as well as the distinctly “super-hyped electronic metal” aesthetic of the music itself.
Finally, the band’s logo also depicts a sort of brand identity, sporting dragon wings (congruous with the name “DragonForce”) and an angular, emboldened typeface with ornate, tail-like embellishments adorning many of the letters (in particular emphasising the D, F and E).
