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#10. WHEN ALBUM COVERS GO BAD
This article  THE ANNIVERSARY, Designing A Nervous BreakdownVAGRANT, 2000: EMO Man, this is one colourful cover - so colourful, in fact, that I nearly had a nervous breakdown looking at the thing. See, the idea is for people to buy the album, not run away screaming from it. I heard that when you make a negative of the album cover and make an animated GIF out of both pictures, it induces vomiting and epileptic fits in small children. Oh, and I guess the album cover is supposed to be an Atari-like map of the anatomy of the head or something. Whatever, it still looks like shit. Way to design an album cover that was out of date the day it came out, people.  THE GREAT KAT, Rossini's RapeTHOMAS PUBLIC RELATIONS, 2000: WANK METAL One of The Great Kat's gimmicks is the ability to be a female and play shred guitar. The other gimmick is playing classical music in the speed metal vein. When you put them together, add some S&M, and utilize a main selling point (that would be the tits, for those not playing attention), you have the world's most boring album cover. Hell, if The Great Kat looked like Chyna or Velma from Scooby-Doo, no one would give two shits about her or her music. Sure, the fact that OMG SHE'S A CHICK AND SHE'S PLAYING SHRED is a better gimmick than Green Jellö, but shred is not going to put her over. Perhaps the man could have worn a Mexican wrestling mask or something?  CRYPTHOWL, Tragedies Beheld By The CemeteryOUPIRIC PRODUCTIONS, 2000: BLACK METAL Here's an atypical Cradle Of Filth-inspired black metal cover: spooky-looking dark background, ominous-looking moon, some evil-looking ghost, a gate, some grimacing man/woman thing, and text as red as the blood of the defiled virgin. I guess this is supposed to be eeevil or something. It looks dorky, to be quite honest. I guess the band can be excused this monstrosity because they're Russian. Their site, by the way, had an imposing curse on it. When I read the words "THE SITE IS UNDER THE CONSTRUCTION" I felt five seconds of my life disappear. Now that, my friends, is eerie. Don't be the next to fall under their infernal curse.  FEZ DISPENSER, Fez DispenserSKIN AND BARREL, 2002: ELECTRONICA ("JAZZ-INFLUENCED ABSTRACT POST-HIP-HOP") Apparently, the man who put this out won two Emmys for sound design in the 1990's. That's great, because the album cover is the most basic thing I've seen in some time. It looks like it was thrown together in five minutes using Photoshop, and the most amazing thing about the album cover is the way the word "pez" was digitally altered to say "fez" - ergo, Fez Dispenser. While sound design is Matt Thorne's strong point, sight design obviously isn't. By the way, is it just me or do those two yellow things look more like soap bars than Pez candies? I'm curious.  GOD IS MY CO-PILOT, Straight NotOUTPUNK, 1993: "QUEERCORE" This is one gay album cover, and I'm not saying that because the band is gay either. I hate when bands throw together a bunch of clipart and call it an album cover. Sure, my logo was done in five minutes using Photoshop but at least I cared about it from a design point of view. There are some clouds, a generic gay-type person, and the album title in Courier New (I'm assuming). The album title is also only clever to those who have no sense of humour. GET IT? THEY'RE GAY! STRAIGHT NOT? THE NOT/KNOT PUN ISN'T THAT SO DAMN CLEVER?! I've probably alienated 95% of my readership by talking about this album.  HEADCRASH, AnusbashSELF-RELEASE, 2001: GOREGRIND Ah, Fucked-Up Anus Man. That shit never gets old...oh wait, it does. I realize this is a CDR and a lot of goregrind bands use pictures of disgusting-looking things as album covers, but could you Danes have picked a more generic picture if you tried? Oh, wait. You could.  HERESIARH, Mythical Beasts and Mediaeval WarfareDEMOLITION, 2000: "DRAGON METAL" As if you couldn't tell, this album cover has to do with dragons of some sort. Having read the bio on the Demolition Records website, I think my brain broke trying to wade through the pretentiousness. Suffice it to say that this band plays folk black metal and their subject matter is swords and dragons...or something. I like to keep it simple and call the music "shit." It's just better that way. Damn Latvians. By the way, this album is Part I of a three-part series. God help us.  LEATHERFACE, MinxROUGHNECK RECORDINGS, 1993: PUNK Not much to say about this. Obviously, a name was slapped onto a picture of a girl and a cow and called an album cover. A lot of Leatherface album covers are like that. I've heard this band lauded long and loud as one of the best punk bands of the 1990's, so I won't comment on the music itself (after all, I can't). Still, isn't this one of the most generic things you've ever seen? This is the perfect example of a good band hiding behind a rather nondescript album cover.  LUX OCCULTA, The Mother and the EnemyMAQUIAVEL MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, 2002: BLACK METAL I've always wondered why black metal bands, especially symphonic ones, have to use the prototypical "naked virgin striking a pose" image on their album covers. Obviously it's supposed to mean something "deep" and "meaningful," but most people don't give a shit about anything deep and meaningful. The average metal fan (who is, of course, male and a lover of porn) will pick this up for the tits. Still, if I wanted to listen to black metal, a pair of tits aren't going to convince me to listen to the album if what's inside amounts to nothing more than shitty keyboards and pretentious, musically boring dross. I've never listened to Lux Occulta, by the way, and I feel I'm all the better for it.  MERLIN, They Must DieGREAT WHITE NORTH, 2000: BRUTAL DEATH METAL This album cover is probably the most Worst of Metal-ish thing I'll talk about today, and it amazes me how utterly clichéd the whole thing is. Normally, brutal death metal bands have painted covers, but here we have the female lead singer looking stoned and holding a skull. Y'know, if you cut off the top of the skull and put a suet ball in the cavity, you'd have the most brutal birdfeeder in human existence. Russian bands have the most uncreative album cover designs sometimes.  NIRVANA, NevermindDGC, 1991: IF I HAVE TO TELL YOU WHAT KIND OF MUSIC NIRVANA PLAYS, THEN YOU ARE AN IDIOT I'm going to piss off a lot of people (especially those who like to insult me by reiterating the name of my site) by including this album cover, but what the hell does this cover stand for, anyway? There's a naked baby swimming towards some US currency that is hanging there on a hook, which I guess is supposed to signify something. Either it's some riposte against capitalism, or it's mocking our consumer-based society. Maybe the baby is some sort of hair-metal kid and the cover is detailing his love for material things. MAYBE, just maybe I'm not up on the details yet, this album cover is just something thrown together to look "alternative" or "different." It's a naked baby swimming towards money. It serves the same purpose as any other cover. It's there to look pretty and attract record buyers. If Nirvana hadn't become the poster child for "alt-rock," this album would have languished in obscurity between Chem Lab and Raggadeath in the clearance bin of the local Disc-Go-Round. Every album cover is fair game as far as I'm concerned.  WITHOUT FACE, Astronomicon"ELITIST" (REALLY EARACHE), 2002: GOTH METAL Covers like this just scream GOTH. The cover looks very generic and while it is technically well-done, there's just something to it that makes me want to rip into it. Perhaps it's the overlay of hands. It might be the wings that look OH-SO-GOTH. My money is going on the fact that the album cover is a bunch of clichés thrown together to look meaningful. It's stylistically the same as the Nirvana cover, really. The addition of the overused Morpheus font to the album cover is also a nice touch. It could have used a dove, though.  BIZEX-B, Vi LeverSELF-PRODUCED, 1982: PUNK Apparently, this is supposed to be a classic Swedish punk album. I also realize that the damn thing's twenty-one years old. Still, for such a classic album, that is one generic album cover. I know it's supposed to be punk, but the cover just looks so rushed. Yes, this is punk and a lot of bands don't have the money for a good cover, but this is weak even for punk. Fear's "The Record" album cover is better than this, and that's saying something given that the entire cover is the word FEAR in big stencils. In short, this is the most punk album cover you'll ever see in your life. Look at it in awe and then puke on it.  PRIMAL DAWN, Primal DawnSELF-PRODUCED, 2000: DEATH METAL The final album cover I'm going to cover today is one you've seen before. You know what I think of the album. Still, I think the cover is rather dumb. The superimposed skull, to be quite honest, makes the cover, sticking out like a sore thumb on it. I don't mind the graveyard, and without the skull this album cover would just look boring. The skull, though...should it really have hair? I guess it's a hair-metal skull. Ummm...I think I should end the article right now. My awful jokes are making my brain atrophy. Until next time, stay brutal and HEY SHUT UP YOU'RE THE POSEUR! 03.08.3003  
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#1: Introductions
#2: Ten Worst Cartoon Companies
#3: How To Be A True Black Metal Warrior
#4: Reviews Page #1
#5: WEED!
#6: Musick Bla-Bla-Bla
#7: TNN/Spike TV Review
#8: Reviews Page #2
#9: Whiny Metal Rant
#10: Shitty Album Covers
