Coloured hexagons and dashings of ELO

Music moguls everywhere and somewhere have voted Muse's 'The Resistence' album's sleeve artwork the best of its kind from 2009. Designed by London firm, La Boca, the cover depicts a sole figure standing on a bright platform leading straight to the planet Earth breaking through a strange landscape of coloured, interlocking hexagons suspended in space. A fantastic cover illustrating the weird and wonderful epic themes of the music on the album itself. The parents got me this album for Chrimbo and I've only had around three or four listens so far. Like U2 and Coldplay, to name but a few, Muse always get a bit of a slagging in the press for being pretentious with their lyrics and themes but Muse never fail to make a pulsing, energetic album this time with lots of dashings of dance and ELO and even a suspiciously similar version of the Doctor Who theme tune in the track 'Uprising'. Just in time for the new Doctor Matt Smith getting onboard the TARDIS.
Jenny Saville's fantastic painting on the Manic Street Preacher's 'Journal for Plague Lovers' came a close second in the vote with Fever Ray's artwork in third place. Fever Ray's artwork was designed by Martin (Mander) Ander who came from a graffiti art background as did Robert Del Naja (3D) of Massive Attack who also appears in the top ten for the design work on their latest EP album, 'Splitting the Atom'. 3D's work is always exciting, weird, challenging and crazy to look at, just as his band's music is to listen to.
LaRoux's cover also appeared in the list and immediately makes you think of classic photographic album covers such as David Bowie's 'Heroes'. Obviously La Roux ripped off Bowie's hairstyle from the same cover for her whole look and it's probably not the only thing 'ripped off' either.
It's nice to see that CD artwork still get's recognised with some respect in this downloading age and makes you realise just how great it would be if these works were still widely available as proper vinyl sized cases.