Blood and Fire vs Soul Jazz

Blood and Fire is a reggae reissue label based in the UK. They’re responsible for ensuring that a raft of classics including The Congos’ Heart of the Congos and releases by King Tubby, I-Roy and numerous others are still in print. I take my hat off to them. Except that I’m just not keen on their cover designs:

They don’t look so bad in this reduced size, but in reality the photography is too glossy, it has no sense of texture or age, no grittiness - unlike the wonderfully imaginative, earthy music each design seeks to represent. The sans serif typography on the Fisherman Style disc is particularly inappropriate. I think the biggest problem is that it’s clear there’s some sort of intention behind these, it’s not that they just didn’t care, but that they cared too much and ended up with something inappropriate - that’s where the discomfort lies, at least for me. This is in inevitable contrast to Soul Jazz’s designs which, with their bold colours and equally bold typography is so resonant of the 1970s, reggae’s golden period, is convincing and just feels ‘right’: