The NME jumped on the WTF album cover bandwagon with a list of its own “Worst Ever” album covers, but this once cutting-edge music pub has clearly fallen out of touch. Naming the Beatles (Magical Mystery Tour), Black Sabbath, and a few other luminaries in their worst-ever list was not only lazy, but a little bewildering. There are PLENTY of MORE awful LP covers than the ones they pictured…

For example, get an eyeful of the boring, stupid, but ultimately NOT “worst ever” cover for a Chris Brown recording called Graffiti,

Now granted, I don’t know anything about Chris Brown aside from the fact that he beat the living daylights out of his girlfriend a few years back and that his music does NOT appeal (give us old-school Isaac Hayes funk over reheated me-too hip hop any day of the week), but this album cover certainly is NOT one of the “worst ever” in spite of what the NME staff coughs up.

Granted, NME gets points for the Chumbawumba “live birth” album cover for Anarchy, and one from Royal Trux which is so vile it beggars belief. If NME were running a “three worst album covers ever” post, they might have something, but the other 47 or so are nowhere near close to being the worst ever made. No, this is just sad, lazy and pretty weak. Not to get all record nerdy about it, but five seconds worth of digging will come up with far more horrifying images, believe me.

NME doesn’t even get a pass on the sourcing of these covers, as many other collections of “best ever” and “worst ever” photos are tagged “as voted by you”. Not so on this particular group of awful album covers…ahh, NME, once upon a time you were tops in your field. Today?

And when it comes to “worst album covers”, with few exceptions, none of the records in the NME collection come close to being topped by this:

You may commence screaming now.