When trying to sell your new album, it’s vitally important NOT to have a cover which looks like it was assembled by a committee of kindergarten-age head trauma patients:
Never mind the shoddy presentation of this album, kids–this geezer is singing his love ballads in a NEW ACCENT! Hold on to your zippers, it’s gonna be a long night!
This totally bewildering album cover (ok, it’s the cover for a SINGLE, not a full-length album, but STILL…) come by way of the absolutely fabulous Bad Record Covers site, which has plenty of visual atrocities on display for your amusement. Behold:
This HAS to be some kind of ironic statement about the futility of war, right? Because otherwise it’s likely some kind of sick nationalistic drum beating exercise designed to whip people into a frenzy of…well, ok, settle down. It’s probably nothing aside from a really awful idea for a record jacket.
I hope.
The real point of all of this is to send you over to Bad Album Covers to get your fill of awfulness for the day. Some vinyl blogs might consider a site like this “the competition” but as far as Turntabling goes, there can NEVER be too many bad album cover detectives working out there. It’s a big, scary world filled with millions of intimidating discount record bins. Who could get through them all? Not me.
–Joe Wallace
Remember, kids–when you see the severed head of some goofball evangelist preaching the gospel to you, it’s probably time to LAY OFF THE ACID.
Never mind how appallingly, redneckity-sexist this album cover is. Forget about how stupid the album cover concept might be, and dispense with all your well-founded objections over it being simple-minded and flat out DUMB. Just for a second.
See if you can guess what kind of a record this is just by looking at that idiotic “please laugh at my jokes” expression on Rodney Carrington’s southern-fried face for a moment.
That’s right, kids, Rodney Carrington is perched on a woman’s breasts in order to sell his particular brand of “comedy”, which seems to entail a sort of sub-Jeff Foxworthy redneck-in-the-city schtick, complete with an “aw, shucks” delivery in the most contrived tractor pull accent he can muster.
And to make things worse, he’s a SINGING comedian, too. Oh, lord, please kill us all now in a torrent of nuclear fire so that we never, EVER have to endure another listen to this crap. It’s not just funny, it’s offensively not funny. As in, these jokes are so stupid you’ll actually get offended that someone is trying to sell an album full of them.
Here’s a direct quote: “”The zoo is so dayumm boring, they need to make it more exciting…take a Slim Jim, stick it in the ayuss of a death row inmate and haive heyum rum thraw the lion cage widdowt geddin beeyut.”
Effing HILARIOUS, to somebody somewhere, probably. But not anywhere near an area with a population greater than three.
Don’t get the wrong idea–we’re not in favor of whitewashing comedy in favor of an all PC landscape free from anything that might be “wrong”. Transgressive humor is funny because, well, because it’s not supposed to BE funny. But there’s a big difference between pushing boundaries and brick-in-the-face DUMB, which really gets the hackles up for certain writers who discover these things while idly surfing the internet for bizarre recordings.
Sometime between Brian Austin Green’s turn on the horrifically dull Beverly Hills 90210 and the show’s cancellation, Green decided to go into a recording studio. He dropped his pants, squatted over a microphone, and pinched out the steaming atrocity you see before you.
“One Stop Carnival” is every bit as dull as 90210, but with the added wannabe pastiche of white boy hip hop thrown in for good measure. Green–or his record label minders–apparently thought that substituting “da” for “the” on every other song title would add some street cred to this flushable collection of me-too beats and lame-ass rhyming.
On the opening track, Green leaps into his Captain Lame-Ass act as hard as he can in the first 30 seconds, blurting out “Yeah man…she was fat, but I ain’t gonna tell my friends…” and “Hey, yo…HOWS IT GOIN’?”
One-record-wonder Green even has the gall to include a track critical of the music industry. That’s a sign of defiance in many cases (reference the Sex Pistols one and only full length studio record from the original glory days of UK punk) but for One Stop Carnival, it’s a definite sign of trouble akin to having your movie directed by Alan Smithee.
And while we’re examining this dead cockroach up close, how about that album cover? Green was clearly going for some kind of Henry Rollins/Ice-T scowl, but instead he comes across in dire need of some stewed prunes.
And yes, believe it or not, this actually did make it to vinyl–at least according to Discogs.com. It was mostly distributed on CD and poor unfortunates who feel an overpowering urge can download this on MP3, but a “sampler” LP was put out as a promo of some kind back in ’96 when this stinking pile was dumped onto an unsuspecting public.
I don’t know who Wendy Bagwell is, but the utter horror of these album covers is plenty, thanks. Suitable for framing. In HELL. Look at those grotesque rictus grins! Who was applying the leeches during this photo shoot? And more importantly, WHERE? Not to mention the utterly Beavis & Butthead snickers the album title lends itself to.
But wait, the horror doesn’t stop here! More awfulness…
by Joe Wallace
Let’s start with the obvious. This may look, feel, and SMELL like a Creed record, but it’s not. Wait–you mean the guy on the left ISN’T a cartoon rendition of that whiny lead singer with a pair of horns on?
Oh, sorry then.
But if you actually heard this record, you’d SWEAR it was Creed–it’s every bit as wretched and filled with half-baked, warmed over doofus-shite. Some might argue that it’s not a fair comparison to put Creed side by side with Christmas At The Devil’s House, but lest we forget, Creed was responsible for bringing generic guitar twaddle with what sounds like Eddie Vedder’s untalented half-brother at the mic.
And they had a right-wing “family values” type songwriting agenda which makes all their lyrics as suspect as John Travolta’s motives for making “Battlefield Earth”. Whenever you hear “I love you,” lead singer boy is probably talking about Mister God. Yuck.
Christmas At The Devil’s House is every bit as uninspired–it’s that “Let’s play classical music with metal guitar noises” crap that makes people vomit uncontrollably after exactly ten seconds.
The album cover itself is merely goofy–but it promises something the record itself won’t deliver. WHERE ARE THE SATAN-THEMED CHRISTMAS SONGS? It’s almost July at the time of this writing, which means Christmas in July sales and other nonsense to do with Santa wearing a bathing suit.
But there’s no real presence of Satan on this album unless you think a metaloid cover of “Greensleeves” is a secret message from The Dark Overlord commanding us to slaughter our neighbors and make love to the parrot.
This album wouldn’t really make it into the Turntabling WTF gallery of crap record covers except for the fact that you really, really expect the record to have more Satan on it. Instead, you wind up feeling cruelly misled by the crude artwork. And maybe that’s the Devil’s trick; if you were dumb enough to PAY for this you got what you deserved?
This album cover tells a story. It’s the story of how the Oak Ridge Boys broke into your apartment, made love to your pets, ate all the barbecue, and then sat patiently waiting for you to come home from work so they could re-enact scenes from Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.
This is how they sat while they waited for you to come home from a long holiday shift you didn’t want to take, but had to at the last minute. Cue the scary music, because now, you’re putting the key into the lock of your apartment door and you’ll soon be face to face with The Men With The Sentient Facial Hair.
–Joe Wallace
Listen to the DJ Paisley Babylon demo mix and book today
. More info: jwallace (at) turntabling (dot) net.
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