Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978–1984, British music journalist Simon Reynolds describes the sound of the album as "pared and sparse." He goes on to describe Pattinson's "granite basslines" carrying the melody; Sergeant's guitar playing as "jagged-quartz" and avoiding "anything resembling a solo, apart from the odd flinty peal of lead playing"; de Freitas' drumming as minimal and "surging urgency"; and McCulloch's vocals as having "precocious authority." Reynolds describes the songs as being rooted in "doubt, anguish, despair" while the "tightness and brightness of their sound transmits contradictory sensations of confidence, vigour and euphoria." He also describes how the line "Stars are stars and they shine so hard" from the track "Stars Are Stars" showed how the band felt no embarrassment in their wish to be famous. In 1989 McCulloch told Reynolds how, as a teenager, he felt there was "a big movie camera in the sky." McCulloch described the opening line of the track "Going Up" "Ain't thou watching my film" as a terrible line, and he went on to say "It was meant to be tongue in cheek, but that was what spurred me on." Cover The cover photograph is one of a series taken by photographer Brian Griffin in the woods near Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire at night. The photos show themes of introspection, despair and confusion. Describing the cover photo, music journalist Chris Salewicz said, "[...] the Bunnymen are placed in poses of histrionic despair in a near-neurotically gothic woodland that evokes memories of elfin glades and fabled Arthurian legends." Creem magazine said, "The cover art suggests four boys dazed and confused in a drugged dream, a surreal where-are-we landscape. The Bunnymen's images are of loneliness, disconnection, a world gone awry." Originally the band wanted the pictures to include burning stakes, but given the possible KKK connotations, they settled for moody lighting instead. However, McCulloch was pleased with the cover, saying "the cover [...] is better to look at than the Mona Lisa." Sergeant was less happy, saying that he "was pissed off that there was a solo picture of [McCulloch] on the back cover." In the book The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs, Bill Drummond says that he saw the face of "Echo", an imagined giant rabbit, in the cover design. Releases The album was originally released as an LP in the United Kingdom on