Cessna’s third album is all over the place stylistically, bouncing between pop by way of the classic Scandinavian breeze, Os Mutantes and Gainsbourg, garage and psych by way of The Famous Boyfriend, The Monochrome Set, Velvet Underground, Section 25 and Can, laid back and spacious cowboy riffs, an unclassifiable rainy-day synth meets acoustic guitar hybrid, and a haunting piano and feedback epilogue. Thanks to exquisite editing (and probably to the analogue production techniques used throughout), the album cohered into a record worthy of the term “voyage.”
At this point, the design theme becomes obvious…
Is the woman in the foreground waving “hello” or “goodbye”? Whichever it is, it’s part of a cycle that she’s doomed to repeat.
Unlike the crisp silhouette on the front cover, the jet on the inside is distorted.
In a testament to the printing plant’s attention to detail, the CDs initially arrived at Radio Khartoum HQ with the inner jet miraculously “fixed.” That must have taken some work! Which subsequently had to be unfixed: the plant had to reprint the digipaks and repackage the discs in the unfixed ‘paks.
The original concept for the inner sleeve was an airport baggage tractor (train) driving into the sunset, rendered in a style similar to that of the previous album. Post 9-11, it proved impossible to obtain a suitable photo for a model: my camera and I were chased off more than one runway.
Thanks to NASA, high quality lunar landscape images are readily available.
A matte varnish on the disc highlights the earth (stylized with oversize halftone pattern) as seen from the moon.
