10,000 Days this ain’t. It’s not the photo on the cover of Throwdown’s otherwise excellent new album Venom & Tears, which comes out today, that I object to; it’s the two holes punched through the CD booklet that are driving me nuts. I guess that, in keeping with the whole “venom” theme, they’re supposed to look like snake bites*, but that really only works on the few pages where the holes are lined up with bite marks on the chick on the cover – the rest of the time, it just looks like there are two big holes in the middle of the lyric pages (now I’ll never know what Dave Peters is screaming in the middle of “No Love!”). And I know in this day and age of legal and illegal downloading this will effect very few Throwdown fans, but why are the five of us who still bother to purchase actual CDs being punished for this practice? Aren’t we, like, the only ones keeping the record industry alive right now?

Oh well. I guess we should just be grateful no one thought the book should arrive sopping wet to symbolize “tears.”

-AR

*This doesn’t really work anyway, since, as the above photo demonstrates, snake bites aren’t perfectly spherical. Ultimately, the holes punched just make the album look like it was pulled out of the bargain bin.