Brilliant albums with horrible album covers

Most of PT's covers are gross on some level. SW's as well.

 

Haven't looked thru all 29 pages of this, but so far, I'm not surprised to not see any Blue Notes; those covers were - for the most part - brilliant.

 

Black Sabbath - Born Again (1983)
I realize beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and while the album itself rocks! , this just looks hideous to me:



Here's the original photo, which I'd say is not much better:


Well, I guess its mother loves it!

 

Never cared for the Beatles - White Album.

 

Yeah, they didn't even bother to give it a proper artwork!

 

Well... to me various Kinks sleeves have this budget almost DIY like quality. Like trying to tap into the zeitgeist. "Something Else" is a very good example for this. Then there's the excessive 70's-ness of the RCA works, the not exactly pc "Low Budget", the rebellion-by-numbers grafitti thing - deemed good enough to use twice - or the ultra-80's sleeve of "Word Of Mouth". And that's not all. Of course not everybody would call these "brilliant albums".

"Kontroversy" or "TVGPS" are great artworks though.

 

Why the bullets belt? Thrash metal?

 

It's like, how much more white could this be? And the answer is none. None more white.

 

This was true of course until they put out the limited edition collector’s version in Vantablack

Vantablack - Wikipedia

 

You need the crap album brilliant cover thread,. It’ll be along in a minute

 

But it fits what the band projects, so how is it an awful cover?

if it had been the cover for say, All Things Must Pass, it would be a different matter

 

More a daypack than a proper rucksack. It's probably barely large enough for it to contain enough clothes for her to put on to avoid arrest.

I always hated that cover, but probably not for the reason you think. It's that "rucksack". The colour, against the colour of her skin, is just wrong. Besides which, as I said, the rucksack should be bigger, which would in fact make the image sexier.

 

Is that seriously one reason you don't like the cover?

How do you determine how big the rucksack should be?

 

You're seriously asking whether I am serious?
No I'm not, since you asked.

Just ask yourself: have you ever seen a naked female hitch hiker wearing a rucksack as small as that one? I venture to say you have not.

 

Well, I get that Born Again was a new beginning for the band, but I don't think this cover demonstrates full recovery from its birthing process. Considering Ian Gillan only lasted in Black Sabbath for one album, I suspect it probably didn't pass the APGAR test.

 

She might just have a t shirt and a pair of denim shorts in there.

And a toothbrush.

Her phone’s probably about her person somewhere....

 

A phone from 1984 - the Motorola DynaTAC (the first mobile phone) - from when the album came out...

 

If we take out "hitch" I have.

 

On the other hand, what I call the "realism fetish" sucks as a criterion for judging anything artistic. So there's that.

 

Well, obviously one sees naked ladies on the hiking trails all the time. On the roadside, though, not so often.

 

Just what hiking trails are we talking about here ?

 

Two of my favourite covers! Both iconic.

 

Echoes of Pogles’ Wood....
Weirdly, I played the lp on Spotify for the first time last night (tip off from another thread). . First song is ace .

 

Ah, that would be telling.