Category Archives: album

WTF Album Covers: Pleasureman by Gunther

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WTF bad album covers gunther pleasureman

I thought Gunther was joking. Surely, I wondered aloud, this HAS to be some Saturday Night Live gag spun off into its own release. Please tell me this guy’s not for real. Pleasureman here can NOT be serious.

But he IS.

Let’s consider the album as a unified concept for a moment–the images, the song titles, the face of the dork on the cover. You get Gunther’s faux-sexy “the Metamucil isn’t working” grimace, but you ALSO get staggeringly smooth and sophisticated tracks like Ding Dong Song. We’re talking high class material for the jet set here. Oh yes indeed, you ought to wrap your ears around this so you can get SUPER sexy before you go out on that blind date and turn on charm.

Tell me how you’ll be sustaining your arousal level without chemical assistance after listening to this nonsense. This stuff sounds like a VERY low rent Hyperbubble ripoff without the fun or canny observances of social phenomena (hear Pictures of Paradise for some great multiple entendres and commentary.

I do like the fact that Gunther is fondling himself on this album cover…indicative of what he did through the entire recording process in one way or another.

For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipgnosis

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For the Love Of Vinyl Hipgnosis

Even if you don’t know the name Hipgnosis, you know the work. Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Led Zepplin, 10CC, a whole slew of bands that all got the benefit of amazing, surreal cover art by the geniuses at Hipgnosis, which Throbbing Gristle/Coil member Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson joined in 74.10cc How Dare You

One of the very best designs by the group, for our money, is the work Hipgnosis did on the 10CC album cover for How Dare You? which manages to tell a complete story without actually conveying any plot information whatsoever.

The CD version of this album is often given the short shrift, sometimes missing one or more panels that reveal the whole tableaux. The album version of How Dare You is the one to see as it has the entire spread of carefully crafted Hipgnosis images. Amazing. Keep your Houses of the Holy, we love 10CC better.

For the Love of Vinyl gives a detailed look at 60 Hipgnosis designs and features guest commentary from musicians including Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason. This is a pretty amazing tome, and is in fact written by the founders of the design group itself, so you know you’re getting the stories right from the source. Recommended.

WTF Album Covers: God Is A Killer

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WTF album covers God Is A Killer

A lifetime of gratitude to the blog A Basement of Curiosities for turning me on to the wonders of A.A. Allen, who was apparently a bit of a revolutionary in the pulpit as he was a pro-integration activist at the height of Jim Crow, separate drinking fountains and the rest of America’s big ugly period where the Constitution only applied if you were the right sort of white anglo-saxon-protestant jackass.

Progressive as Allen might have been on some fronts, he was a fire-and-brimstone loony and faith healer. But like all religious maniacs, he couldn’t heal himself and is said to have dropped off the twig in 1970 due to alcohol-related liver failure. Whoops!

This album cover is a treat. Allen looks more than a little like a Wild Bunch-era Ernest Borgnine, but that expression on his face implies that something long and wriggly has just crawled up his rectum. The title is a hoot–of COURSE God is a killer! Look at all those church collapses, Jihads and right wing holy wars. God’s in it up to his eyeballs, a river of blood to flood a thousand universes.

Funny thing is, Allen doesn’t seem to mind. From what I read at A Basement of Curiosities, Allen seems to get off on telling his audience that if they don’t wanna “get saved” God might just have to disembowel them (my words, not his) and send them downstairs to have sex with the devil. (My words again, I can’t help myself. Maybe I’m possessed.)

This one’s a real treasure.

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WTF Album Covers: Tammy Faye Bakker Run Toward The Roar

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Tammy Faye Bakker bad album cover

There is nothing in this world better than a born again Christian putting out another grotty album of craptacular warbly gospel songs shrieking about Jesus…with some IMPLIED BESTIALITY on the album cover. Look at her puckering up here! I’ve heard of a donkey show, but this is taking things to even sicker, more twisted extremes.

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