It’s been a banner year for unintentional plagiarism. It didn’t even take until the release of Hardwired… to Self Destruct for people to accuse the band of ripping off Crowbar’s Odd Fellows Rest, which Kirk Windstein quickly shot down. However, Deep Purple might want to have a word with their graphic designer, as they released the album artwork to their forthcoming InFinite (out on April 7) yesterday, and their logo looks a hell of a lot like the Devin Townend Project’s logo. Like uncannily so. And if you know one thing about DTP fans, they aren’t silent. Neither is Townsend, who’s pretty active on Twitter, and responded to his fans asking about the tribute/ripoff:
Re- deep purple logo: not a big deal to me. Not sure it should be…plus it’s Steve morse and he can do whatever he wants 🙂
— Devin Townsend (@dvntownsend) December 14, 2016
Ok, so no harm, no foul. It’s not like Purple is banking on fans getting confused and picking up their latest thinking it’s by Devy, nor are they an up and coming band that would need to do something like that. Meanwhile, Decibel caught up with Dimitri Scheblanov of Herring & Herring, the firm that designed Hardwired… To Self Destruct‘s album cover to ask them about their similarity between their cover and Crowbar’s. Not surprisingly, they’d never heard of the New Orleans sludge band. However, he kind of doubles down and suggests that not even Metallica was aware of the band, which is, well, probably not true at all:
I’ll tell you the funny thing: on Tuesday the record came out, then I guess that Friday or Saturday we went out to Minneapolis to see Metallica play because they were projecting the photos up on the screen [at the concert]. So afterwards when we were at the afterparty with the band, we were talking with management and with some of the guys from the band and talking about all the different comments we’d gotten since the album art came out. Somebody brought up the Crowbar thing. The funniest bit of it was everyone was like, “Who the fuck is Crowbar?” That made it feel a little bit better, because we were kind of shocked, but because other people within the community didn’t really know about them either we felt it wasn’t such a huge deal, that it wasn’t a well-known enough thing to where most people would think that there was some kind of copy-catting. So at first we were really shocked by it but then hearing that they were kind of a smaller act we definitely felt better about it since it’d be pretty bad if people felt we were trying to rip somebody off.
Smaller act, eh? Wrong.
