Monthly Archives: May 2009

WTF: Denmark Vs. Sweden

Crap album art isn’t always about the thing itself. Sometimes a merely nauseating album cover can reach dizzying new lows when compared side-by-side to equally barf inducing artwork. Submitted for your approval, all the way from Denmark–the cover of Laid Back’s Keep Smiling album. This isn’t the most rotten thing ever made, but let’s call this artwork…uninspired:

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Now compare it to the utterly goofy and craptacular cover for this Swedish nonsense– Kjell Kraghe’s Vind I Seglen. This album cover takes the seafaring them to a similarly fucktarded new low. We’re faced with a serious chicken-and-egg question here. Which wretched cover came first? Was this some kind of harmonic convergence of dumbass graphic design? Or was somebody thinking, “No way is that OTHER windmill-and-wooden-shoes country going to show US up in the dumbass graphics department!”

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This album cover reminds me of Beavis and Butthead episode where Butthead delivers a stunning critique of a bad 90s music video by merely uttering the phrase, “Look at his FACE!” That’s all we really need to say here, isn’t it? Except those two sails placed so perfectly in symmetry next to this hambone Ricky Schroeder lookalike makes it appear this guy has some kind of freakish protruberances connected to that suit of his. 

So perhaps these are both, on their own,  merely lame-o record covers. But viewed side by side they give me the horrors. We know Sweden and Denmark are capable of better than this…but then again, we haven’t even started looking at the bad death metal album covers from these two countries. Just you wait, this stuff looks tame (well, it IS tame) by comparison.

Exorcist II: Electric Boogaloo

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I can’t help it, I love 70s cheese, and this is by far some of the cheesiest I’ve seen as of late. Listen to that music! Damn…my favorite part is the cornball little new wavey splash/splat after the chorus girls stop singing. “Skashhhhhhhhhhhhh”. Brilliant.

Here’s the trailer in all its’ wretchedly goofy glory. Remember, kid, this one stars James Earl Jones, Richard Burton, and Max Von Sydow–an all star cast. Darth Vader, the guy who played chess with Death, and Bluebeard together–what a hoot. I wish we could go back to the time that these movies were released, when people still thought the Devil was scary. Of course, all you have to do is look at those clothes to know just how misguided they really were–Satan was the least of their problems. Unless your name was Linda Blair.


Zombie Disco!

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FINALLY, the long-awaited update on the Turntabling front…it has been far too long I know, but the madness round here has been both profitable and amusing. On that note, I’ll be DJing the Chicago Horror Society’s one-year anniversary party and Zombie Disco on June 20th at Chicago’s famous Viaduct Theater. Stay tuned for more details.

Yes, it’s been a little while since the last update–things have gone crazy in the Turntabling camp! Rest assured, the updates begin in earnest now that the smoke has cleared. Here are some of the developments I’ve been working on since the last update here–lots of DJ gigs lining up, some photo shoots forthcoming, and plenty of freelance blogging and editing. It’s been a busy few weeks. Fortunately there’s been plenty of interest in Turntabling.net, and we are pleased to report the Russ Meyer bio is almost sold out. THANK YOU to everyone who purchased copies. Your support of Turntabling is greatly appreciated.

I’ll be adding some exciting new things for sale soon. Stay tuned.

One Pricey Collector’s Item: The Beyond Soundtrack

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I have it on good authority that you won’t be seeing Fabio Frizzi’s great soundtrack for The Beyond resurfacing anytime soon–at least not the one released on Dagored back in the early 2000s. The way soundtrack reissues work is that a record label has to chase down licensing rights and pay for permission to reissue the album. It’s never guaranteed that a label will actually GET permission to put out the album. I have no idea what the status of the rights to The Beyond might be, but it’s not coming out again anytime soon and existing copies fetch upwards of $75 each–and that’s for the COMPACT DISC version, NOT the LP. If you spot it somewhere used and it’s cheaper (as if), you’ve found yourself a bargain. You can search all you want for this LP, but everywhere you look it will be listed as Out Of Stock. Except where it’s being sold for extreme collector prices. If you can tell me different, I’m all ears–I’d gladly scoop up one for myself and a big handful to sell right here on Turntabling.