First Look: Deer Tick's New Album Cover
By Hilary Hughes
Anna Weber
Deer Tick have been the unofficial house band of the Newport Folk Festival (happening this weekend) for the bulk of the past decade or so, hopscotching between stages at Fort Adams since 2008 and hosting the festival's officially sanctioned after-parties with a Narragansett-soaked three-night run at the Newport Blues Café. Deer Tick's front man John McCauley has been a fixture at the Fort, either with his band or solo (as he did last night) or wreaking havoc with Middle Brother, the short-lived Deer Tick/Delta Spirit/Dawes side project. It's only appropriate, then, that Deer Tick one-ups themselves for their latest Newport Folk appearance with a gravity-defying stunt, and the airborne announcement that tore over the bay this afternoon hyped their forthcoming record in a fashion as unpredictable as their explosive live show.
Negativity, Deer Tick's fifth full-length album that drops via Partisan Records on September 24, boasts a bright, minimalist spread on its cover: a tiny canary of a prop plane soars across a bluebird sky, with NEGATIVITY — the record's title — lettered in shocking pink on the banner it pulls behind it. Shot by Anna Weber, Negativity's cover art is a simple, striking image on its own, but Saturday afternoon, the same banner flew over Narragansett Bay at the fest, bringing that whole art-imitating-life thing to a perfect — and perfectly unpredictable — pitch. We have the premiere of that cover here.
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