Heavy Metal Thunder
                                             (2006 - Chronicle Books)  

     (by James Sherry & Neil Aldis)  Sub-titled "Kick-Ass Cover Art from Kick-Ass Albums".  Note the smaller size (only 7x7) of this thick square volume.  Many other album cover artbooks are the size of LP Vinyl albums themselves, allowing multi-image pages to still have large representations of the individual pieces, but not here.  Album covers of Heavy Metal bands are reproduced here, with all the typography and many extremely interesting logos.  Many of those covers are photographic in nature, but 136 of this book's 256 pages are primarily painted & drawn images.  Incredible creativity is on display here, but as you might imagine, much of it goes over to the 'dark side', including some images that many will find repulsive. Each album cover is also captioned with the band's name and the album title, but not the artistic information.  They have gathered all that information (apparently to the extent they know it) into 3 dense pages in the back, covering artist, photographer, art direction, concept, design, graphics & logos. Unfortunately, this is all presented in page order and not additionally indexed by alphabetical name.  For that matter, research into these details was not as comprehensive as it could be - I was able to identify much more than a handful of the un-named artists with some simple web-searching (and I would be hard-pressed to believe that the information I found was not available five or six years ago . . .).  51 of the images get a full-page treatment and they canvas the following artists: William Benson, John Blanche, Tom Boas, Trevor Brown, Jonathan Canady, DB, Gustave Doré*, Les Edwards, Errol Engelbrecht, Shepard Fairey (with Chris Peasley), Uwe Farling, Richard A. Ferraro, H. R. Giger, Michael Golden, Thomas Holm, Doug Johnson, Ken Kelly, Conrad Lant ("Cronos"), Rob Leecock, Sam Leyja, Sean Linehan, Vincent Locke, Rodney Matthews, Pushead (Brian Schroeder), Edward J. Repka, Derek Riggs (5), Sean Rodgers, Gary Ruddell, Jeff Sadowsky, Dan Seagrave (3), Rick Spellman, Junior Tomlin, Tyler, Kris Verwim, Kristian Wĺhlin ("Necrolord") (2), Michael Whelan (2)*, Steve Woolley and UNKNOWN ARTIST (4).

* - Note that the 'well-presented' pieces here by Doré, and Whelan, are all additionally found so (better) in their own collections further up The List.

Other record album art

  1000 Record Covers  [BELOW THE LINE]

other Chronicle releases

  Chronicle's paperback cover art collections

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