Textual Analysis- Rise Against - Appeal To Reason (2008)

As well as being one of my favourite texts music-wise, the digipack design for Rise Against’s 5th studio album “Appeal To Reason” is one of my favourite designs.



One of the first things which grabs my attention is the clear colour scheme consisting of only yellows, reds and black. The strong contrast between the yellow background and black silhouettes allows the album cover to stand out rather well.The vast majority of the images across the digipack are of a political or war like nature, for example the gun at the top left of the front cover or the man in the gas mask. This relates to the musical content of the album. Many of Rise Against’s songs are about politics or war; “Hero Of War” in particular makes a statement about war crimes committed by soldiers in the Iraq war. This can be seen as conventional of the punk/ melodic hardcore genre due to the fact that many bands of their ilk attempt to spread some kind of political message.

One of the silhouettes on the front cover shows what looks like a man or child singing into a microphone while in the air, this is actually a reference to one of rise against early texts in particular the artwork for the single “Prayer Of the Refugee” this is part of the consistent design aesthetic of the bands work, along with the inclusion of their “Heartfist” icon.



For this digipack the designer has chosen to have the lyric booklet glued in, this works very well in this case since the image on the booklet has been positioned so that it blends right into the image on the cardboard behind. In addition to this the colour scheme used inside the lyric booklet also matches the rest of the product.
Most music is usually produced to entertain the audience; however in analysing Rise Against’s work it can be seen that they also intend to inform the audience. A clear example of this is how they have referenced other texts in a way that encourages people to look into them. On the inside cover there is text saying “Read: A peoples history of the united states by Howard Zinn” as well as "See:The Ground Truth wal-mart: The High Price Of Low Cost".



The back of the digipack contains very conventional information such as the tracklist and copyright information. They also have the address for the bands website, myspace and their record labels site (Interscope.com). Another conventional feature shown on the back of the digipack is the image of the band, they are shown in silhouette form, this allows them to agree with the “Images of the artist” convention while still holding onto a consistent design aesthetic throughout the piece. The Artist and album name is also on the spine of the digipack, this is probably the most universal convention of the CD case/ digipack.



I believe the unique selling point for this product is the fact that it offers a multi-layered text, on the surface it can be seen as another piece of music. However if you look deeper at most of the images involved they are trying to say somthing about the world. Additionally the bands name and iconography will appeal to the bands previous fans.