Scott Wood Band - album artwork design

So this is a particularly refreshing album. A tune band with drums, bass and searing electric guitar. Any one who knows me, will attest to my love of electrified, rocking folk music. I grew up on Wolfstone, Shoogles and Martyn Bennett and for a while there it seemed that the influence of contemporary, hard edged, elctrified tune based music was falling out of favour with the young folk. This album has allayed these fears. Mixed by Tyler Duncan and produced by Cal'{do} Macrimmo' this album is polished and sounds big, they have managed to keep things sounding live too, which is also refreshing. The tune playing is accomplished and expressive and the rhythm section is present and to the fore. On 'Sheep Running about' the arrangement is wonderfully enhanced with an immense fat distorted bass. This I can not commend enough :) And McCready's is something special alright, the pipe bends at the start and, well; Davie Dunsmuir's solo! Some kindo 'steezy' scottish blues! Classic! Epic! and the bass at the end is great, reminded me of the great Paul Jackson.The brief for 'Upsurge' was pretty open ended, the guys were happy to convey their thoughts and let me distill that into something visually tangible. So the artwork was a bit of a stab in the dark from my end. It wasn't until the near completion of the project that the band settled on a name for the album. So I had prepared a few different concepts and acted as a sort of a catalyst for the bands creativity, aiding them to visualise the music and eventually settle on a title that they thought summed the whole thing up. Man alive, naming things is very difficult and people do so often struggle to label their creations with a title. Pictures always help in forming an overview of a project and in this case it certainly worked out well. As with most of my album artwork designs there is a small story in the folding out of the package. I like this approach, it draws people in and gives a deal of function to the packaging in framing the music in some sort of context...So the story here starts with the view from the Arrochar torpedo station out across Loch Long. See the photos post here... http://somhairle.co.uk/scott-wood-band-photography/ A bright, etherial star is breaking the horizon bringing, startling, high-intensity light into the dark and forgotten interior of the clandestine structure, the waters are rising... Upon opening the cover the waves come crashing in trough an opening in the wall, crashing into rusted corrugated iron and burnt wood. The waves are strong and magical, with sparkling sprites and fairy dust within. On the inside we have some close up's of some heavy sea's crashing on the rocks. The upsurge has arrived and it has arrived with FORCE!These photo were taken on 35mm film, on my nasty little Russian range finder. See this post for details on that annoying little machine of amazing... http://somhairle.co.uk/#kiev-4-bringing-back-the-film. To make these pictures right for high fidelity print I went so far as to get enlarged prints made from the negatives and then scanned them back in. The original 6x4" prints were not sufficient to bring out the insane detail in the waves. Satisfying indeed :)The packaging is all topped of with a poster with an image of the band on one side and all the track info, thank you's plus an extrapolated design of the logo on the other side. So; very pleased with this one. You should go buy it, it's a great listen and it's heartening to hear young musicians inject some electricity and rock back into trad music.http://www.scottwoodband.com/