Monday 29 March 2010

The death of Youth Crew Alex (records)


This post will be a little different to my regular ones because i am going to talk about YCAR and to be more specific the Shout Aloud demo 7"!
YCAR was to be my record label and my aim was to put out bands demo's so that tehy could reach a wider audience either in Europe or the states!
My first idea was to put out 2 local bands demo tapes and to get them hear outside of the UK those bands were In this for fun (now Basement) and Dungeons! This was quickly put down when Dungeons announced that they would be breaking up soon. In this for fun (Basement) were still down but needed to record and all i needed was to save up to get things rolling! A little while later i stumbled across the band Shout aloud on myspace, i believe that they were recommended to me by someone who had me added as a friend on myspace at the time. After hearing the band i contacted them and asked if they would want me to do a second run of the tape. The band agreed and seemed excited so whilst In this for fun were recording i got the SA ball rolling!
I contacted my friend Jay Jacoby and asked if he would be up for doing the art work! Jay had done work for bands such as Alert, Outlast and the YCAR logo, i was probably one of his biggest fans! Jay agreed and asked what i had in mind. I believe i asked for something along the lines of " the band with animal heads rocking out" Jay agreed but asked me to supply some reference material and heres what i provided him with :
I cannot remember who is hidden under this eagle head if im honest

on bass is Keith "the eagle" Freeman from Alert
Vitya from Shout aloud is the only one on the cover based on a member from the actual band
on vocals Ryan from Outbreak (i've lost my photoshopped version with the cougar head)


From the reference material Jay sketched out a scene and sent me the rough sketch i believe that the first version had a differnt bass to the one i have here which was later changed to be Sasha from the bands. The band also requested that they be wearing some crucial shirts! here in the sketch you can see Vitya wearing a Uniform choice shirt!

Once i had approved the sketch and the band had as well Jay went ahead and finished the sketch with inks! as you can see a chain and judge shirt were added and the bass was changed slightly!

Jay was also kind enough to contact his friend jym 129 who did Graffiti and ask for some designs for the font on the cover. heres a few of the designs and the one we chose for it in the end:

After we decided upon one of the fonts i set about doing a layout. heres the one i was eventually happy with and the band initially agreed to.

the inner sleeve for my version would have looked like so

The band were keen on having more than one cover so they sent me an image that they liked for a alternative cover and i put that together as well (below)
so after this things went on hold for a little while whilst i got some money together. In this time the band asked a friend to have a go at redesigning the cover and this is what he came up with

the insert:
and reverse of insert
i really liked this design so i approved it and this was to be the regular version with my cover as a pre order incentive.
so a few weeks went by and some stuff happened in my life im not going to go into detail about but it meant there would be no way in hell i could devote the money and time to YCAR that it deserved so i decided that YCAR would be no more until the day that i could afford to do it again.
Luckily during the process of desining etc i had linked Seb from Just another day records to the band and he loved what he heard. Sebs plan was to wait until i had released the tapes and use that as the incentive to press the demo to 7" Seb had even suggested we release them side by side as a joint collaboration! After i told Seb i wouldn't be able to release the tape he put the Demo 7" into production and the rest is JAD history not YCAR.
Seb and the band thought it would be a nice idea to use the demo tape art as the demo test press sleeve. I also get a mention in the sleeve for my efforts and i couldn't be happier that the band have been able to do this.

JAD will be releasing another Shout aloud 7" later in the year! Keep an ear out for that!


1 comment:

Seb said...

I should have used those graf logos to stamp the records, oh well if i had know before.